semantemen.

1922 Amer. Hist. Rev. 27 773 The fundamental distinction made [in J. Vendryès' Le Langage (1921)]..between ‘semantemes’, elements of [concrete] meaning, and ‘morphemes’, formal elements.

1925 P. Radin tr. J. Vendryes Language ii. i. 74 By semantemes we understand the linguistic elements which express the ideas of the concepts..and by morphemes we understand those elements which express the connexions between the ideas.

1933 S.P.E. Tract (Soc. for Pure Eng.) No. XXXVIII. 596 We already have plenty of synonyms for rumour, news, report, &c., to which semantemes the word khubber does not add any new shade of meaning.

1938 I. Goldberg Wonder of Words xvi. 323 The smallest meaning-unit of a word is called a semanteme.

1960 G. Thomson Greek Lang. 1 The words composing a sentence may be divided into two kinds: those which express concepts (‘full words’ or semantemes) and those which express relationships between concepts (‘empty words’ or morphemes).

1974 M. Taylor in tr. C. Metz Film Lang. p. x The word ‘working’ is constituted of the ‘lexical’ moneme (or semanteme..) ‘work’ and the ‘grammatical’ moneme ‘-ing’.

1985 Times Lit. Suppl. 12 Apr. 400/1 Neutrality can be a property only of grammar, while semantemes have always been soaked in some emotional fluid or other.

2002 Aleph 2 261 The morphological boundary between semanteme and morpheme in an Arabic word.

1938 I. Goldberg Wonder of Words xvi. 324 If, in addition to its phonemic and semantemic elements, a word has another element, that element is morphemic.

2005 D. Wills Matchbook i. 2 The unidirectional monemic or semantemic elements of the utterance.