I'd be interested to see more development of this idea, because I've noticed just the opposite: words mean what they mean because a society chooses to use them that way. An English examples is "strike", which mean "hit" in bowling but "miss" in baseball.>A second point that I’ve noticed is that when one looks at a term that appears to have multiple meanings, when one looks at the underlying >action, what one finds is the same action applied to different contexts.
I think you're describing an idiom with this example. I'm not sure there's a difference between an idiomatic usage and a "complex lexeme," but there it is.
>A third point, one must differentiate between simple lexemes and complex lexemes. A complex lexeme is where two or more words are >combined to give a different meaning than what each single word has: e.g. “to fish out” has a different meaning than “to fish”.
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