Lexicon

Table of Contents

The word lexicon is derived from the Greek word “lexis” which means “word”. Lexicon is the knowledge that the native speaker has about a language. It is a universally accepted fact that the lexicon is the most essential element in language processing. Without knowledge of words, no language can be understood. A language user’s mental dictionary is the lexicon. When a linguist says that something is listed in the lexicon, this means that it must be stored in the speaker’s memories. 

The content of the lexicon is an important issue for any theory of morphology because lexical items are the fundamental building blocks of morphological structure. They are the bases to which morphological rules apply.

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a person, language or branch of knowledge. It is the collection of words that every speaker of a language has. It is also called lexis. Lexicon may also refer to a stock of terms used in a particular profession, subject or style. The lexicon is a mental dictionary in which we store specific information about all the words that we use; how they are pronounced, what they mean, etc. 

The lexicon is the bridge between a language and the knowledge expressed in that language. Every language has a different vocabulary, but every language provides the grammatical mechanisms for combining its stock of words to express an open-ended range of concepts. Different languages, however, differ in grammar, the words, and the concepts they express.

The lexicon includes information about

• The forms and meanings of words and phrases

• Lexical categorization

• The appropriate usage of words and phrases

• Relationships between words and phrases

• Categories of words and phrases

Phonological and grammatical rules are not considered a part of the lexicon. Lexicon is often used interchangeably with the word dictionary, and in fact, the two have extremely similar meanings. Both describe a complete list of words in a vocabulary, almost always in alphabetical order and their definitions. However, a dictionary almost always includes other features such as synonyms and pronunciations, while a lexicon may or may not. 

Example

The lexicon of soccer (called “football” outside of the United States) includes terms such as linesman, friendly match, yellow card, penalty shootout, pitch, result, and draw.

Mental Lexicon

The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word’s meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers’ lexical, or word, representation.

The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon in that it is not a general collection of words; instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker. An individual’s mental lexicon changes and grows as new words are learned and is always developing.

The mental lexicon is the mental representation of lexical knowledge in the brain of the individual language user. The mental lexicon of an individual is always smaller than the lexicon in the linguistic sense: nobody knows all the established words of a language. Moreover, the mental lexicon exhibits an asymmetry between production and perception: we understand probably about five times more words of our mother tongue than we actually use in language production. The mental lexicon refers to the way words settle in the mind. Taking into account the huge number of words, an organizational structure of the mental lexicon must be extremely sophisticated. The main links that relate words in the mind are coordination, superordination, and synonymy.

Lexeme

In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of a lexicon of a language. A lexeme is the smallest or minimal unit of lexicon in a language that bears some “meaning”. A lexeme has a morphological form, semantic content and a syntactic category. A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, which roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. Lexeme is an individual word with an inflexion form or grammatical variant. 

Example

‘Run, runs, ran and running’ are forms of the same lexeme “Run”. ‘Find, finds, and finding’ are forms of the English lexeme “Find”.

Lexeme is not equivalent to a word or morpheme in a language. Sometimes, one lexeme can be formed of more than one word and morpheme also. 

Example

The lexemes like “take off and put up with” consist of two and three words respectively. The meaning of these lexemes can be determined by taking the constituents together, and not from the individual words taken separately.

Lexeme may be an individual word, a part of a word, or a chain of words. An example of a lexeme would be the word ‘create”. When appearing alone, it conveys a single meaning. But when used as the stem, it can take on inflected forms such as ‘created’ and ‘creating’, which alter the grammatical function of the original stem. It can also take a derived form such as ‘creator’, which is a more distinct, though related, lexical unit. 

One lexeme can take up more than one inflexion to form a set of many words known as inflected variants. 

Example

The lexeme “Play” can take up many forms like ‘play, playing, plays, and played’. All of these word forms have the same basic meaning (which is denoted by action) and, hence, will be categorized under the same lexeme. 

The word Playing is the participle form of the verb that is used to denote the same action in a continuous aspect. Likewise, the word Played is used to denote the past form of action, the word Play when the subject of the verb is present in first and second person or third person plural, and the word Plays when the subject of the verb is present in the third person singular in English subject-verb agreement).

Types of Lexeme

A. Variable Lexeme

Variable lexemes are those lexemes which have two or more inflective forms.    

Example

Hard represents the lexeme which has ‘hard, harder, and hardest’ as its forms.

Work represents the lexeme which has ‘works, worked, and working’ as its forms.

B. Invariable Lexeme

Invariable lexemes are those lexemes which have no inflective forms.

Example

The word efficiently has no inflective forms. To make its superlative or comparative degree we add modifiers to this word.

Lexical Relations

Words are not only containers of meaning and fulfill the events but also they have a relationship with one another. One part of knowing the meanings of lexemes in any language is the recognition that two or more lexemes may have some semantic relationships. 

Some of the lexical relations are the following:

a) Synonyms

Synonyms are words that have the same or similar meanings. All words can have synonyms. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs can have synonyms as long as both words are the same part of speech. 

Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. 

Example

Small-little, short-tiny, soft-silky, weak-wimpy, faint-flimsy etc.

b) Antonyms

An antonym is a word that means the opposite of another meaning. For instance the antonym of hot is cold. The root word for the word “antonym|” are the words “anti” meanings “against|” and “onym” meanings “name”. To better understand the meaning of a word, we can take the antonym of that word. There are two categories of antonyms.

Example

On-Off, Small-Big, Hot-Cold, Dead-Alive, Old-Young etc.

c) Hyponyms

When the meaning of one form is included in another is called a hyponym. In simple terms, a hyponym shares a type of relationship with its hyperonym. 

Example, 

pigeons, crows, eagles and seagulls are the hyponyms of Birds (their Hyperonym).

Example

Purple, White, Black, Red, Green, Yellow, and orange are the hyponyms of Colors (their hyperonyms).

Lexicology

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the vocabulary of a given language. It deals with words, their origin, development, structure, formation, meaning and usage. In short, it is the study of the significance and application of words.

In lexicology, the word and the vocabulary of a language are studied as a system. The basic task of lexicology is the study and systematic description of the vocabulary with respect to its origin, development and current use. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims and methods of scientific research of lexical systems on the ways and tendencies of vocabulary development.

Lexicology deals not only with simple words in their aspects but also with complex and compound words, the meaningful units of a language. Since these units must be analyzed in respect of both their form and their meaning. Lexicology relies on information derived from morphology, and semantics, the study of their meanings. A third field of particular interest in lexicological studies is etymology, the study of the origin of words. However, lexicology must to be confused with lexicography, the writing or compilation of dictionaries, which is a special technique rather than a level of language study.

Lexicology and Syntax

Syntax studies the rules of sentence-making. Thus syntax is concerned with the relationship between words in constructions and the way these words are put together to form sentences.

One may know the words of a language but without the knowledge of syntactic rules, he or she will not be able to put them into grammatically correct sentences. On the other hand, a sentence may be syntactic but unacceptable from a lexical point of view. 

Example

a) Colorless ideas sleep furiously. 

b) The flower gracefully walked away.

In short syntax and lexicology have a deep relationship with each other. Lexicology is all about words while syntax is all about rules and regulations on the basis of which we have to properly arrange these words. So both are essential for each other.

The essential difference between syntax and lexicology is that the former deals with general facts of language and the latter with special aspects. It is the main question of general versus particular.

Syntax is general because it deals with rules and regularities that apply to classes of words as a whole, while lexicology is particular because it is concerned with the way individual words operate and affects other words in the same context. Although borderline cases do exist in both lexicology and syntax, e.g. in the case of “grammatical” or “function” words the distinction between the two levels is fairly clear.

Content and Function Words

Content words are full of meaning, and they form the core of the communicative message of a sentence. They are like snow and mountain which carries the content or the meaning of a sentence. They are also called lexical and open-class words. They are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

Function words are those words which indicate a grammatical relationship. They serve important functions to express grammatical relationships with other words in a sentence. They are also called closed-class words. They are pronouns, determiners, prepositions, conjunction, articles, auxiliary verbs, and modal verbs.

Lexicology is just the study of content or lexical words. We are not concerned with function words in lexicology.

Lexicology and Phonology

It may be thought at first sight that phonology does not interact with lexicology in any significant manner. But a close analysis will reveal that in many cases the difference between otherwise identical lexical items can be reduced to a difference at the level of phonology. Compare the pairs of words pill and bill, sheep and ship, meat and meal, and boy and toy. They differ only in one sound unit (the position of which has been shown in each word) and yet the difference has a serious effect at the level of lexicology. As suggested by these examples, the sounds responsible for the difference may occur anywhere in the structure of the word; i.e. at the initial, medial, or final position. 

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