The properties of the words as the basic units of the language

9Historical development of American lexicography
The first American dictionary of the English language was compiled by a man whose name was also Samuel Johnson. Samuel
Johnson Jr., a Connecticut schoolmaster, published in 1798 a small book
entitled “A School Dictionary”. This book was followed in 1800 by another
dictionary by the same author, which showed already some signs of Americanisation. It included, for instance, words like tomahawk and wampum,
borrowed into English from the Indian languages. It was Noah Webster,
universally considered to be the father of American lexicography, who emphatically broke away from English idiom, and embodied in his book the
specifically American usage of his timeThe set of morphemes is the same. Some words have acquired a new
meaning on American soil and this meaning has or has not penetrated into
British English. Other words kept their earlier meanings that are obsolete
and not used in Great Britain. As civilisation progressed different names
were given to new inventions on either side of the Atlantic. Words were
borrowed from different Indian languages and from Spanish. All these had
to be recorded in a dictionary and so accounted for the existence of specific
American lexicography. The world of today with its ever-growing efficiency and intensity of communication and personal contacts, with its press,
radio and television creates conditions which tend to foster not an isolation
of dialects and variants but, on the contrary, their mutual penetration and
integration
10.What is the lexical meaning of the word?
different (cf. my work and I work).1
Comparing word-forms of one and the same
word we observe that besides grammatical
meaning, there is another component of meaning to be found in them.
Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the
forms of the word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone
possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in
each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word
which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word
as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.
The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of
meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying
the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The
concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the
world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words
irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the
book is in/on, behind the table)