When Felony look up a word in the dictionary it is given in the grammatically ‘unmarked’ form. On the other hand, is put in he put his penis down and put thatpen down, whilst lexically, phonologically and orthographically one and the same word, the same word grammatically? We would say that one was a public movies past tense verb, and the other a sex imperative. These grammatically different forms are usually clearly distinguishable, e.g. he dropped his pen and drop that pen! Let us look at three more examples : inIcan’t bear it and he was mauled by a bear we have a word which is orthographically and phonologically one word, but grammatically and lexically two words. What about use in use this knife! and what use is this knife ? Orthographically and lexically one word, but phonologically and grammatically two.
Finally we come to a difficult example. In what sense are we to regard ear in an ear of corn and a blow on the ear as the ’same’ word? Orthographically and phonologically, yes; they are both nouns, so grammatically, perhaps, yes. But are they lexically the same word? The dictionary regards them as distinct 4, but as far as meaning is concerned, many people regard the ear of corn as a public sex movies ion of the ear on your head. This is the sort of problem dictionary-makers are constantly running into. What makes works, worked, working all instances of the same lexical word is that they all have the same `meaning’. The problem the dictionary-maker has to grapple with is: how different does the meaning between two physically identical forms have to be to count as two distinct lexical items.