Vocabulary statistics
Laurie Bauer · 2013
The difficulty here is a terminological one. It seems contradictory to say both &s;Suck and sucks are two different words&s; and &s;Suck and sucks are the same word.&s; The apparent contradiction arises because we are using the word word in two different ways. With a bit of technical jargon we can solve the problem. We can say that suck and sucks are two different WORD-FORMS representing just one LEXEME. Sucking and sucked are other word-forms which also stand for the lexeme SUCK.