sememen.

1904 A. Noreen Vårt Språk V. iii. 6 Detta sålunda definierade abstrakta begrepp ‘betydelse’ uppträder in concreto alltid i någon viss språklig dräkt, som ofta kan efter omständigheterna vara mycket varierande, och det kallas då semem, hvilken term alltså kan definieras som: ett visst bestämdt idéinnehåll, uttryckt i någon språklig form, likgiltigt hvilken.

1911 A. L. Elmquist in Jrnl. Eng. & Germanic Philol. 10 321 Semology [in Noreen's Vårt Språk] deals with the ‘semem’ and Morphology with the ‘morfem’.]

1913 Jrnl. Eng. & Germanic Philol. 12 87 This need not have been the only or even perhaps the usual sememe associated with the morpheme flik in O. Scand.

1926 L. Bloomfield in Language 2 157 The sememes..which stand in one-to-one correspondence with the morphemes, cannot be further analyzed by linguistic methods.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. x. 162 The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe. The linguist assumes that each sememe is a constant and definite unit of meaning, different from all other meanings, including all other sememes, in the language.

1949 E. A. Nida Morphol. (ed. 2) vi. 155 Each sememe (the meaningful contrastiveness of any morpheme) would then be subdivided into allosemes.

1954 C. E. Bazell in E. P. Hamp et al. Readings in Linguistics II (1966) 329 At the European Semantic Conference, held at Nice in March, 1951..it was agreed to call the fundamental unit of content (in the linguistic norm) the sememe.

1965 N. Chomsky Aspects Theory Syntax 230 We could perfectly well state the facts..in terms of such new notions as ‘semantic subject’, ‘semantic object’, various kinds of ‘sememes’, etc., but such proliferation of terminology contributes nothing toward clarifying the..issues.

1973 Screen Spring 234 Greimas analyses the units of content (lexemes) into constant minimal semantic nuclei (semes) and contextual semantic units (sememes).

1953 C. E. Bazell Ling. Form 81 The sememic level is approached when several congruent morphemes of this type are regarded as a single unit, for commutation is then usually possible.

1968 P. M. Postal Aspects Phonol. Theory viii. 198 The four current properly linguistic strata are, in hierarchical order from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, the sememic, the lexemic, the morphemic, and the phonemic.

1973 Archivum Linguisticum 4 119 By a ‘semantic base’ Hutchins means a set of ‘sememic graphs’.

1953 C. E. Bazell Ling. Form 81 Sememically the unit may normally be taken as zero.