Lexémákat

Lexémákat, or lexemes in English, are the fundamental units of meaning in a language’s lexicon. A lexéma is an abstract unit that encompasses all the morphological forms that share a core semantic content. In other words, it represents the underlying concept behind a word, independent of its particular surface form.

A single lexéma can be realized by multiple word forms through inflection, derivation, and conjugation. For example, the English verb be has several surface forms such as am, is, are, was, were, being, been, all of which belong to the same lexéma be. The corresponding lemma is often the canonical form used for indexing, but the lemma and the lexéma are not identical concepts: the lemma is a specific dictionary form, while the lexéma is the broader abstract unit of meaning.

Lexémák are typically organized in a lexicon or dictionary, where each entry includes information about its part of speech, semantics, inflectional paradigm, usage, and examples. They are central to linguistic analysis, lexicography, and natural language processing, where lemmatization and morphological analysis reduce surface forms to their underlying lexémák.

Semantically, lexémák can exhibit relations such as synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, and hyponymy, and they participate in lexical fields and collocations that shape meaning in context. Although the term is widely used in Hungarian linguistics, the concept of lexéme as an abstract meaning unit is common across many languages and linguistic traditions.