Lexicon

A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν (lexikon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning 'of or for words'.^[1]

This article is about the linguistic concept. For other uses, see Lexicon (disambiguation).

Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes).^[2] In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrases are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.

Size and organization[edit]

Items in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic elements but contain both phonological and morphological components. When describing the lexicon, a reductionist approach is used, trying to remain general while using a minimal description. To describe the size of a lexicon, lexemes are grouped into lemmas. A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology. Lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords that list the citation forms and any irregular forms, since these must be learned to use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas. The lexicon is also organized according to open and closed categories. Closed categories, such as determiners or pronouns, are rarely given new lexemes; their function is primarily syntactic. Open categories, such as nouns and verbs, have highly active generation mechanisms and their lexemes are more semantic in nature.

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Innovation, the planned creation of new roots (often on a large-scale), such as slang, branding.

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Borrowing of foreign words.

(composition), the combination of lexemes to make a single word.

Compounding

of compounds.

Abbreviation

the reduction of compounds to their initial letters, such as NASA and laser (from "LASER").

Acronyms

a morphology change with a category, such as a number or tense.

Inflection

a morphological change resulting in a change of category.

Derivation

the compounding of morphemes into a single word.

Agglutination

the modification of loanwords to fit a new language's sound structure more effectively. If, however, a loanword sounds too "foreign", inflection or derivation rules may not be able to transform it.

Phonological assimilation

where new words undergo inflection and derivation analogous to that of words with a similar sound structure.

Analogy

the modification of words' stress or accent.

Emphasis

a form of semantic extension.

Metaphor

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