The Lexicon

The first assumption we will make is that one of the things that a speaker of a language knows is facts
about words. We know, for instance, how a given word is pronounced, what it means and where we can
put it in a sentence with respect to other words. To take an example, the English word cat is known to be
pronounced [kæt], is known to mean ‘a small, domesticated animal of meagre intelligence that says
meow’ and is known to be able to fit into the marked slots in sentences (2), but not in those marked in
(3):
(2) a the cat slept
b he fed Pete’s cat
c I tripped over a cat
(3) a *the dog cat the mouse
b *cat dog howled
c *the dog slept cat a kennel
[Note! An asterisk at the beginning of a sentence indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical]

It is obvious that this knowledge is not predictable from anything. There is no reason why the object that
we call a cat should be called a cat, as witnessed by the fact that other languages do not use this word to
refer to the same object (e.g. macska (Hungarian), chat (French), Katze (German), gato (Spanish), quatus
(Maltese) kot (Russian), kissa (Finnish), neko (Japanese), mao (Chinese), paka (Swahili)). Moreover, there
is nothing about the pronunciation [kæt] that means that it must refer to this object: one can imagine a
language in which the word pronounced [kæt] is used for almost anything else. This kind of linguistic
knowledge is not ‘rule governed’, but is just arbitrary facts about particular languages.

Part of linguistic knowledge, therefore, is a matter of knowing brute fact. For each and every word of the
language we speak it must be the case that we know how they are pronounced and what they mean. But
this is different from our knowledge of sentences. For one thing, there are only a finite number of words
in any given language and each speaker will normally operate with only a proportion of the total set of
words that may be considered to belong to the language. Therefore, it is not problematic to assume that
knowledge of words is just simply stored in our heads. Moreover, although it is possible, indeed it is fairly
common, for new words to enter a language, it is usually impossible to know what a new word might
mean without explicitly being told. For example, unless you had been told, it is not possible to know that
the word wuthering found in the title of the novel by Emily Brontë is a Yorkshire word referring to the
noise that a strong wind makes. With sentences, on the other hand, we know what they mean on first
hearing without prior explanation. Thus, knowledge of words and knowledge of sentences seem to be
two different things: knowledge of words is brute knowledge while knowledge of sentences involves
knowing a system that enables us to produce and understand an infinite number of them (an I-language).
Clearly, part of knowing what a sentence means involves knowing what the words that constitute it mean,
but this is not everything: the meanings of the words three, two, dogs, cats, and bit simply do not add up
to the meaning of the sentence three dogs bit two cats (if you think about it this sentence might mean
that anything between two and six cats got bitten, which is not predictable from the meaning of the
words).

Let us assume that these different types of linguistic knowledge are separate. We can call the part of I-
language which is to do with words the Lexicon. This might be imagined as a kind of mental dictionary in
which we store specific information about all the words that we use: how they are pronounced, what they
mean, etc.

Categories
Lexical knowledge concerns more than the meaning and pronunciation of words, however. Consider the
examples in (2) and (3) again. The word cat is not the only one that could possibly go in the positions in
(2), so could the words dog, mouse and budgerigar:
(4) a the dog slept
b he fed Pete’s mouse
c I tripped over a budgerigar
This is perhaps not so surprising as all these words have a similar meaning as they refer to pets.
However, compare the following sets of sentences:
(5) a the hairbrush slept
b he fed Pete’s algebra
c I tripped over a storm
(6) a the if slept
b he fed Pete’s multiply
c I tripped over a stormy

There is something odd about both these set of sentences, but note that they do not have the same status.
The sentences in (5), while it is difficult to envisage how they could be used, are not as weird as those in
(6). Given that neither sets of sentences make much sense, this does not seem to be a fact about the
meanings of the words involved. There is something else involved. It seems that some words have
something in common with each other and that they differ from other words in the same way.
Hence, the set of words in a language is not one big homogenous set, but consists of groupings of words
that cluster together. We call these groups word categories. Some well-known categories are listed
below:
(7) nouns
verbs
adjectives
prepositions
The obvious question to ask is: on what basis are words categorised? As pointed out above, it is not
straightforward to categorise words in terms of their meaning, though traditionally this is a very popular
idea. Part of the problem is that when one looks at the range of meanings associated with the words of
one category, we need to resort to some very general concept that they might share. For example, a well
known definition for the category noun is that these are words that name people, places or things. While
this may give us a useful rule of thumb to identifying the category of a lot of words, we often run into
trouble as the notion is not particularly precise: in what way do nouns ‘name’ and what counts as a thing,
for example? While it may be obvious that the word Bartók names a particular person, because that is
what we call the thing that this word refers to, it is not clear why, therefore, the word think is not
considered a name, because that is what we call the thing that this refers to. Moreover, the fact that the
words:
(8) idea
weather
cold
friendliness
diplomacy
are all nouns means that the concept thing must extend to them, but how do we therefore stop the
concept from extending to:
(9) conceptualise
atmospheric
warm
friendly
negotiate
which are not nouns?
Fortunately, there are other ways of determining the category of words, which we will turn to below. But
it is important to note that there are two independent issues here. On the one hand is the issue of how
the notion of word category is instantiated in the linguistic system and on the other hand is the issue of
how we, as linguists, tell the category of any particular word. As to the first issue, word categories are
simply properties of lexical elements, listed in the lexical entry for each word, and, as we have pointed
out, lexical information is arbitrary. Therefore, word categories are whatever the linguistic system
determines them to be. While there may be some link between meaning and category established by the
linguistic system, for now it is not important that we establish what this link is or to speculate on its nature
(does meaning influence category or does category influence meaning, for example?). More pressing at
the moment is the issue of how we determine the category of any given word. Before looking at specific
categories, let us consider some general ways for determining categories.