Technical terminology

Sydney Lamb, the originator of stratificational grammar, was careful to make the terminology of his system as consistent and perspicuous as possible, but in fitting some of the more or less established terms into his own theoretical framework, he reinterpreted them in a potentially confusing manner. Thus, the same terms have been used in different senses in different versions of the system. For example, “morpheme” in stratificational grammar corresponds neither to the unit to which Bloomfield applied the term (i.e., to a word segment consisting of phonemes) nor to the more abstract grammatical unit that a Bloomfieldian morpheme might be described as representing (e.g., the past-tense morpheme that might be variously represented by such allomorphs as /id/, /t/, /d/, etc.). Lamb described the morpheme as a unit composed of morphons (roughly equivalent to what other linguists have called morphophonemes) that is related to a combination of one or more compositional units of the stratum above, lexons, by means of the relationship of realization. For example, the word form “hated” realizes (on the morphemic stratum) a combination of two lexons, one of which, the stem, realizes the lexeme HATE and the other, the suffix, realizes the PAST TENSE lexeme; each of these two lexons is realized on the stratum below by a morpheme. Another example brings out more clearly the difference between morphemes (the minimal grammatical elements) and lexemes (the minimal meaningful elements). The word form “understood” realizes a combination of three morphemes UNDER, STAND, and PAST. UNDER and STAND jointly realize the single lexeme UNDERSTAND (whose meaning cannot be described as a function of the meanings of UNDER and STAND), whereas the single PAST morpheme directly realizes the single lexeme PAST TENSE.

The stratificational framework, presented in Lamb’s work, consistently separates compositional and realizational units, the former being designated by terms ending in the suffix -on (semon, lexon, morphon, phonon), the latter by terms ending in the suffix -eme (sememe, lexeme, morpheme, phoneme). Ons are components or compounds of emes on the same stratum (semons are components of sememes, lexons are composed of lexemes, etc.) and emes realize ons of the stratum above (phonemes realize morphons, morphemes realize lexons, etc.). Each stratum has its own combinatorial pattern specifying the characteristic combinations of elements on that stratum. Syllable structure is specified on the phonemic stratum, the structure of word forms on the morphemic stratum, the structure of phrases on the lexemic stratum, and the structure of clauses and sentences on the sememic stratum. Phonons are roughly equivalent to phonological distinctive features and include such properties or components of phonemes as labial, nasal, and so on. Sememes are roughly equivalent to what other linguists have called semantic components or features and include such aspects of the meaning of the lexeme “man” as “male,” “adult,” “human,” and so forth. Once again, however, compositional function is distinguished from interstratal realizational function, so that no direct equivalence can be established with nonstratificational terminology. In later work in stratificational grammar, the notion that emes are composed of ons was abandoned, and greater emphasis was laid upon the fact that emes are points, or positions, in a relational network; they are connected to other points in the network but have themselves no internal structure.