The lexeme

[greek]

Let us therefore consider more closely what it is that is to be assigned meanings by a semantic theory. The notion of "word" that is most useful is that of the "lexeme" which is an abstract grammatical construct that underlies a set of "word forms" which represent "the same word" in different syntactic environments. For example, the word forms sing, sings, singing, sang and sung are particular inflectional variants of a lexeme which we may represent for the time being as SING.