Lexical meaning

Based on the Oxford Advance Leaner’s Dictionary, lexical meaning is “the meaning of a word
considered in isolation from the sentence containing it, and regardless of its grammatical context, e.g.
of love in or as represented by loves, loved, loving, etc”.
According to the free dictionary , lexical is “the meaning of a word in relation to the physical
world or to abstract concepts, without reference to any sentence in which the word may occur
Compare grammatical meaning, content word.
Lexical words, also known as content words, have concrete meaning that goes beyond their function
in a sentence. These words refer to things, people, actions, descriptions, or other ideas that have more than
just a grammatical usage. Their meaning is easily identified by a clear concept or item.
The categories of English words that are lexical include nouns, adjectives, most verbs, and many
adverbs. Nouns, for example, refer to specified ideas, people, places, or things. The concepts behind words
like "dog," "love," or "Brazil," for example, are very clear.
Adjectives describe nouns in well-defined ways, providing information about colors, texture,
number, size, and so on. Likewise, adverbs can be lexical words if they specifically describe nouns or verbs.
Because they evoke specific ideas, descriptors like "red," "quickly," "heavy," or "effectively" are considered
lexical.
Most verbs also fall into the lexical category because they refer to specific actions. For example, the
meanings of words like "think," "sing," "understand," and "jump" are easy to grasp.

Grammatical Meaning
According to Lyons (1995: 52) a lexeme may have different word-forms and these word-forms
will generally differ in meaning: their grammatical meaning – the meaning in terms of grammar. For
example, the forms of student and students differ in respect of their grammatical meaning, in that one is the
singular form (of a noun of a particular class) and the other is plural form (of a noun of a particular class);
and the difference between singular forms and plural forms is semantically relevant: it affects sentence-
meaning. The meaning of a sentence is determined partly by the meaning of the words (i.e. lexemes) of
which it consists and partly by its grammatical meaning.
Lyons introduces the term “categorical meaning” which is part of grammatical meaning: it is that
part of the meaning of lexemes which derives from their being members of one category of major parts of

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 speech rather than another (nouns rather than verbs, verbs rather than adjectives, and so on). Thus, all
lexemes with full word-forms have a grammatical, more particularly, a categorical, meaning.
For example, the lexemes ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ have the same categorical meaning: they are both
adjectives. Each lexemes, however, has certain semantically relevant grammatical properties. The two word-
forms easy and easier of the lexeme ‘easy’, though sharing some part of their categorical meaning, differ
grammatically in that: one is the absolute form and the other the comparative form. This difference does not
occur to the lexeme ‘difficult’ for this lexeme has only one form difficult, which does not accept any
inflection.
Though ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ belong to the same category of adjectives, having the same categorical
meaning, they do not share all the grammatical features each has in terms of morphology and syntax. all the
lexemes sharing categorical meaning do not have all the grammatical meanings in common.
Grammatical words, also known as function words, have little definite meaning on their own and are
ambiguous without context. Some also function to impart the speaker's attitude or perspective onto other
words. These kinds of words define the structure of a sentence and relate lexical words to each other.
Grammatical words include prepositions, modals and auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles, conjunctions,
and some adverbs.
· Prepositions are used in a variety of ways, and often have ambiguous meanings dependent on the context.
· Auxiliary verbs like "be" and "have" are used to shift a verb's time, while modals like "should" or "will"
also impact the sense of verb in various ways related to time or attitude.
· Pronouns have little meaning except as placeholders for general nouns.
· Articles also simply qualify nouns.
· Question words, like "why," alter the function of a sentence or replace a noun. Other adverbs can shift
the time or other senses of the lexical words they are connected to.
· Conjunctions link parts of a sentence together by establishing logical relationships between lexical
words.

Grammatical meaning consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm.

Word-class
When a dictionary lists the function of a word, the definition does at least two things: it describes the
word’s lexical meaning and also gives what is traditionally known as the part of speech of the word, which
modern linguists call the word-class; e.g. modern will be marked as a n adjective, modernize as a verb, and
modernization as a noun. The word-class is essential, for when we use a word in a sentence, we have to take
into consideration two factors: its specific lexical meaning and the position it normally occupies in a
sentence, which is determined by the word class to which the word belongs.

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 Lexical meaning is dominant in content words, whereas grammatical meaning is dominant in function
words, but in neither is grammatical meaning absent. The two kinds of meaning can be demonstrated by
nonsense verse. Nonsense sentences of verses are not strings of random words put together. The words are
combined according to regular rules of syntax with grammatical signals, i.e. function words, except that the
content words are arbitrarily invented without lexical meaning and what is left is only grammatical
meaning. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, which appears in his book through the Looking Glass, 1871, is
probably the most famous poem in which most of the content words have no meaning – they do not exist in
the vocabulary of the English language. Yet all the sentences “sound” as if they should be English
sentences. The following is the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” (Note: the author have italicized all the
content words):
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Inflectional paradigm
When used in actual speech, words (mainly nouns and verbs) appear in different forms; e.g. cat –cats,
mouse – mice, to walk, walks, walked, to write, writes, wrote, written, etc. The set of grammatical forms of
a word is called its paradigm. Nouns are declined, verbs are conjugated, and gradable adjectives have
degrees of comparison. The lexical meaning of a word is the same throughout the paradigm; that is, all the
word-forms of one and the same word have the same lexical meaning, yet the grammatical meaning varies
from one word-form to another, e.g. cat is grammatically singular in meaning while cats is
plural; writes denotes third person, singular, present tense, whereaswrote denotes past tense.
On the other hand the grammatical meaning is the same in identical sets of individual forms of different
words, for example, the past-tense meaning in the word-forms of different verbs (played, sang, worked,
etc.), or the grammatical meaning of plurality in the word-forms of various nouns (desks, data, boxes, etc.).

The Difference Between Lexical Words And Grammatical Words

Lexical words supply meaning to a sentence, whereas grammatical words relate the lexical words to one
another. Look at the following sentence that only shows the lexical words: " ___ cat jumped ___ ___ tree
___ ___ dog ran ___." This looks like nonsense. All you know is that it is about jumping cats, running dogs,
and trees. It may be possible to guess the complete meaning of the sentence, but you can't know for certain
because cats, dogs, and trees can be related in different ways. Now look at the sentence with the
grammatical words re-inserted: "The cat jumped into the tree as the dog ran forward." The sentence makes

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sense. Notice, however, that if you put a different set of grammatical words in, you get a completely
different meaning: "The cat jumped from the tree after the dog ran away." You can see that the grammatical
words clarify the logical relations between the lexical words and define their function in the sentence.
Although it's technical, the difference between lexical words and grammatical words is straightforward.
It is an important concept for linguists because the distinction seems to exist in all languages, not just
English. Understanding these differences helps scholars figure out the relationship between the different
languages, as well as the history of the English language. It may even give some insight into how human
minds work. Understanding these types of words will help increase your comprehension of English.
Conclusion lexical meaning is “the most outstanding individual of the word that makes it different from any
other word”. The lexical meaning of a word may be thought of as the specific value it has in a particular
language system, and the ‘personality’ it acquires through usage within that system.
The categories of English words that are lexical include nouns, adjectives, most verbs, and many adverbs.
Lexical meaning is dominant in content words, whereas grammatical meaning is dominant in function
words, but in neither is grammatical meaning absent.
Grammatical words include prepositions, modals and auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles, conjunctions,
and some adverbs.
The difference between lexical words and grammatical words is straightforward. It is an important
concept for linguists because the distinction seems to exist in all languages, not just English. Understanding
these differences helps scholars figure out the relationship between the different languages, as well as the
history of the English language. It may even give some insight into how human minds work. Understanding
these types of words will help increase your comprehension of English.