WHAT IS LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANING IN LINGUISTICS

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Lexical And Grammatical meaning is very important meanings in linguistic study.These

meanings have different roles in linguistic semantics.There is very much difference between two.

A dog barked

The above is a meaningful sentence which is composed of smaller meaningful parts. One of the
smaller parts is the phrase a dog which refers to a certain animal. We call this phrase a referring
expression. A referring expression is a piece of language that is used AS IF it is linked to
something outside language, some living or dead entity or concept or group of entities or
concepts. Most of the next chapter is about referring expressions. The entity to which the
referring expression is linked is its referent.

Another meaningful part is the verb bark, which is also linked to something outside of language,
an activity associated, here, with the referring expression a dog. We call this meaningful part a
predicate. The use of language generally involves naming or referring to some entity and saying,
or predicating, something about that entity.

The sentence also has several kinds of grammatical meanings. Every language has a grammatical
system and different languages have somewhat different grammatical systems. We can best
explain what grammatical meanings are by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from
other sentences that have the same, or a similar, referring expression and the same predicate.

The grammatical system of English makes possible the expression of meanings like these:

Statement vs question:
A dog barked. Did a dog bark?
Affirmative vs negative:
A dog barked. A dog did not bark. No dog barked.
Past vs present:
A dog barked. A dog barks.
Singular vs plural:
A dog barked. Some dogs barked.
Indefinite vs definite:
A dog barked. The dog barked.
Grammatical meanings, then, are expressed in various ways: the arrangement of words (referring
expression before the predicate, for instance), by grammatical affixes like the -s attached to the
noun dog and the ed attached to the verb bark, and by grammatical words, or function words,
like the ones illustrated in these sentences: do (in the form did), not, a, some, and the Now lets
return to dog and bark. Their meanings are not grammatical but lexical, with associations outside
language. They are lexemes. A lexeme is a minimal unit that can take part in referring or
predicating. All the lexemes of a language constitute the lexicon of the language, and all the
lexemes that you know make up your personal lexicon.

WHAT IS THE TRUE SENSE OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANING IN

LINGUISTICS.

The term lexeme was proposed by Lyons, to avoid complexities associated with the vague
word word. Consider these forms:

go, going, went, gone

put up with, kick the bucket, dog in the manger

How many words are there in group (a)? Four or one? There are four forms and the forms have
four different meanings, but they have a shared meaning, which is lexical, and other meanings of
a grammatical nature added to the lexical meaning. We say that these four forms constitute one
lexemewhich, for convenience we designate as go

Group (b) presents a different sort of problem. The expression put up with combines the forms of
put and up and with, but its meaning is not the combination of their separate meanings. Therefore
put up with, in the sense of endure, tolerate, is a single lexeme. The same must be true of kick
the bucket meaning die and dog in the manger when it refers to a person who will not let others
share what he has, even though he does not use it himself.