Lexicon
The vocabulary inventory of a language or branch of knowledge.
Last updated
A lexicon can refer to the complete set of words in a language or the terminology of a specific field, for example, nautical or medical vocabulary.[1] Within the field of linguistics, a lexicon is defined as the complete set of lexemes belonging to a particular language.[1] The term "lexicon" has its origin in the Greek λεξικόν (lexikon), which translates to 'of or for words'.[1]
Quick Facts
- Field
- Linguistics
- Known for
- Vocabulary of a language
- inventory of lexemes
- part of language alongside grammar
- Key concepts
- Lexemes
- lemmas
- open and closed categories
- lexicalization
- neologisms
- borrowing
- compounding
Facts from the source article.
Making and release
Linguistic theories regard human languages as consisting of a lexicon (a catalogue of words) and a grammar (rules for combining words).[2] Mechanisms for lexical expansion include innovation, borrowing, compounding, abbreviation, acronyms, inflection, derivation, and agglutination.[3] Bound morphemes, like most affixes that cannot function independently as words, are also considered part of the lexicon.[2] One key function of the lexicon is to record and maintain established lexical norms and conventions.[4]
When new words become widely used, they undergo lexicalization and are thereby added to the lexicon.[4] A neologism is a candidate for a new lexeme; if it achieves broad and lasting usage, it eventually becomes integrated into a language's lexicon.[5] Children sometimes produce neologisms through speech errors, and other common origins for these new word candidates include slang and advertising.[5] Across the world's languages, compounding stands as the most frequent method for forming new words.[6]
What the cited sources add
Booij's 2005 text also describes compound words as lexemes built from multiple established lexemes, where the overall meaning is not simply the combination of the meanings of those parts.[4][7]
References
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: λεξικός in Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Perseus Digital Library). Sc. 'book'. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Dominiek, "Morphological structure, lexical representation, and lexical access", Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1994 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Ornan, "The Final Word — Mechanism For Hebrew Word Generation", Haifa University Press, 2003; Metcalf, "Predicting New Words — The Secrets of Their Success", Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Geert, "The grammar of words : an introduction to linguistic morphology", Oxford University Press, 2005 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Jaeger, "Kid's slips: what young children's slips of the tongue reveal about language development", Psychology Press, 2005 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Lexicon" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Suman Kalyan Maity, Ritvik Saraf and Animesh Mukherjee (2016). #Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds. In ACM CSCW, San (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Open Library record, ISBN 0199280428 ("The Grammar of Words"). CC0 (metadata); book content not read. openlibrary.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Lexicon (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Lexicon (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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