Words and Lexemes
A single word can have multiple uses and interpretations. Occasionally a headline-writer underestimates this fact and ends up writing amusing headlines when no humor was intended. Here are some oldies but goodies that have circulated widely by e-mail:
BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLAND ISLANDS
MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH
EYE DROPS OFF SHELF
LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS CUT IN HALF
REAGAN WINS ON BUDGET, BUT MORE LIES AHEAD
SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM
JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT
KIDS MAKE NUTRITIOUS SNACKS
The British didn’t really abandon breakfast pastries on the Falkland Islands, and zombie miners aren’t acting up. While waffles tends to be interpreted more easily as a noun, it’s used in the first headline as a verb. Left, conversely, is used as a noun in the headline, but is more often used in speech as a verb. Death in the second headline can be understood as ‘the act or fact of dying’ or as ‘the death of a specific person’ – the intended meaning. The last headline is horrifying until we realize that make is ambiguous in meaning here between two of its thirty-odd meanings: ‘prepare’ and ‘be useful as’. The first sense is the one intended in the headline.
Words like noun, verb, adjective, and adverb refer to what linguists call lexical category. They are labels that tell us how a word is generally used in a sentence. A noun can be the subject of a sentence, but not so a verb. In many cases, identical-sounding or identical-looking words can belong to multiple categories, and that is what is going on in some of these sentences.
Lexical category is basic information about a word, but there is much more that, as linguists, we want to say. For example, waffles ‘batter-cake baked in a waffle iron’ and waffles ‘vacillates’ sound the same but are not semantically related. Death ‘act or fact of dying’ and death ‘the dying of a specific individual’ are. We address the question of what a word is in detail.
