A general term for the fundamental unit of language. This term is sometimes employed in cognitive linguistics in place of theoryspecific terms such as symbolic assembly and construction (1). Cognitive linguists hold that a linguistic unit consists of a conventional pairing of a semantic unit and a form unit, pairing meaning with form.

Linguistic units include so-called inflectional morphemes such as the plural marker '-s' as in toys, meaningful parts of words such as '-er' in teacher, words such as cat, complex words such as cats made up of 'cat' and '-s', idioms such as He kicked the bucket, and sentence level grammatical constructions such as the ditransitive construction, with the schematic meaning x caused y to receive z, and the form subject verb object1 object2 as exemplified by the sentence John gave Mary a bouquet of flowers.