Re: USAGE : English past tense and participle in -et

On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 12:09:47AM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Assuming "monophonemic" is an error for "monolexemic", that seems a very odd
> to me. What could the collapse of a phrase into a monolexemic entity be if not
> the arising of a new word?
It's the arising of a new lexeme.  The reason we have separate words for
"lexeme" and "word" is that they are not equivalent.  In particular,
a lexeme can be a phrase.

I agree that "a lot" is for most Anglophones an unanalyzed set phrase.
I do not agree that its meaning as such is incompatible with its fully-
analyzed meaning, however.

-Mark