Minimal Unit Of Language Essay

In order to realize how difficult it is to express meanings so that they can be easily understood, one has to grasp that not every word has only one meaning and that not every meaning is expressed in only one word. There are three units of meaning:

1. Morpheme, a minimal unit of a language which can be free (it can stand alone as a word) and bound (a grammatical unit (affix) which cannot function as a word, but is always attached to another morpheme);

2. Lexeme, a language unit that may consist of one or more morphemes; and

3. Sentence, a grammatical construction that is complete in itself.

Interesting is the fact that lexemes display three different aspects of meaning. (Kreidler, 28) The first one is denotation, which refers to the correlation between the lexeme and something that is outside of language. Denotation is the primary or literal meaning of a word.

As said above, morphemes are minimal meaningful units of a language. Two morphemes may have the same spelling, but different meaning, which is very difficult to determine. These morphemes are called homonyms. For example, minute (a unit of time) and minute (small), spelling is the same, but the pronunciation and the meaning are completely different. There are also homographs, words with the same pronunciation, but different spelling and meaning. For example, by (near) and buy (purchase). There are also polysemous lexemes, which have several meanings that are related. For example, earth refers to the planet, but it also refers to the ground; foot refers to the part of human body, but it is also a scale unit. Kreidler emphasizes that homonymy and polysemy are often mixed up, but there is a difference between them. (36) More specifically, as can be concluded from the examples above, polysemous lexemes share the same etymological background and/or speakers relate them semantically, while homonyms just have the same phonological