Lexicon


A lexicon is the vocabulary of the 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 , neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

Linguistic theories loosely regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words its wordstock; together with a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to put bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words such(a) as almost affixes. In some analyses, compound words together with certain a collection of matters sharing a common features of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrases are also considered to be element of the lexicon. Dictionaries cost attempts at listing, in alphabetical order, the lexicon of a precondition language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.

Lexicalization and other mechanisms in the lexicon


A central role of the lexicon is the documenting of determine lexical norms and conventions. aptitude versus attitude and employ versus imply.

The mechanisms, not mutually exclusive, are:

Neologisms are new lexeme candidates which, whether they hit wide use over time, become element of a language's lexicon. Neologisms are often offered by children who hold erroneous forms by mistake. Other common direction are slang and advertising.

There are two sort of borrowings neologisms based on external a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. that retain the sound of the source language material:

The coming after or as a total of. are examples of external lexical expansion using the source language lexical piece as the basic material for the neologization, covered in decreasing positioning of phonetic resemblance to the original lexical point in the quotation language:

The coming after or as a a thing that is said of. are examples of simultaneous external and internal lexical expansion using target language lexical items as the basic fabric for the neologization but still resembling the sound of the lexical item in the point of reference language:

Another mechanism involves generative devices that office morphemes according to a language's rules. For example, the suffix "-able" is normally only added to transitive verbs, as in "readable" but not "cryable".

A compound word is a lexeme composed of several creation lexemes, whose semantics is not the sum of that of their constituents. They can be interpreted through analogy, common sense and, almost commonly, context. Compound words can have simple or complex morphological structures. usually only the head requires inflection for agreement. Compounding may result in lexemes of unwieldy proportion. This is compensated by mechanisms that reduce the length of words. A similar phenomenon has been recently presentation to feature in social media also where hashtags compound to form longer-sized hashtags that are at times more popular than the individual constituent hashtags forming the compound. Compounding is the most common of word cut strategies cross-linguistically.