UNIT 2 : Knowing a Word

• Lexical form
• The meaning of meaning
• Forming lexical categories
KNOWING ‘A WORD’

What information
we need to carry
in our minds and

what processes
locate any word
we need to apply
that we need.
in order to
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KNOWING ‘A WORD’

Psycholinguists have come

to certain conclusions by
reflecting on

what we know of words

how they operate.
and

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KNOWING ‘A WORD’

• models (diagrammatic
representations) of our lexical
From these, competence.
• Although the models are
they have tested experimentally, the
constructed results are sometimes
contradictory or difficult to
interpret.

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‘word’
• First,
• A NOTE OF CAUTION about the term 'word’.
• We think we know what a word is because we are so used to seeing words
separated by pauses on the printed page.
• But this does not serve to characterize a word when it occurs in connected
speech.

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KNOWING ‘A WORD’
• The best way of conceiving of a word is as
• a moveable unit of meaning which cannot be broken into smaller free-
standing pieces.
• Furthermore, we should not lose sight of the fact that some units of
meaning (e.g. 'in front of ', 'bus stop', 'by and large') consist of more
than one word.
• So it is often more precise when discussing vocabulary to refer to lexical
items rather than to words.

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Lexical Areas
Psycholinguistic studies of
vocabulary and how we use
it fall into three areas:

Lexical entries Lexical storage Lexical access

What information do we What is the process that

How are lexical items stored
need to store in our mind enables us to retrieve lexical
in relation to each other?
about a lexical item? items when we need them?

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Lexical Areas

We assume that each language user has a personal

vocabulary store, or lexicon,
• from which they select words for use and to which they refer
the words they encounter in the utterances of others.

We envisage each person's lexicon as consisting of a

large set of lexical entries, one for each lexical item.
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Lexical Entry

The question to be •What does a lexical entry of

considered is:
this kind need to contain?

An important distinction
needs to be made
between two types of •Content vs function words
items in the mental
store:
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 i. CONTENT words

•(nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) which

carry the kind of meaning that we can look
up in a dictionary.
•They are also referred to as lexical words.

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ii. FUNCTION words (or functors)

Words which do not have a clear meaning but which

contribute to the syntactic structure of the text.
• Examples might be: the, of, the auxiliary do (as in Do you like . . . ?). These
are also termed grammatical words.

Prepositions of position and movement have a demonstrable

meaning but a function that is mainly grammatical.
• (In some languages, the same function might be performed by a prefix or a
suffix.) Generally, these prepositions are classed as function words.
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ii. Function words

This gives the listener

In English, function words some help in distinguishing
usually carry weak stress them auditorily from
content words.

the BUNCH of
FLOWERS that he
BOUGHT for JANE
.
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Processing Function and Lexical Words

Evidence from brain imaging suggests that function words may be

stored and

processed separately
• from lexical ones.

Why might this be an advantage?

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Phonological Sequence
A phonological sequence refers to the order and arrangement of
sounds in a language.

In linguistics, phonology is the study of the sound system of a

language, including the rules for combining and organizing sounds.

Phonological sequences can refer to the specific sequences of

sounds that are allowed or prohibited in a particular language or
dialect.
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Phonological Sequence
For example, in English, the phonological sequence /pl/ is allowed at the beginning
of words (e.g. "play"), but the sequence /kp/ is not (there are no English words that
begin with /kp/).

Similarly, some languages have specific rules about which sounds can appear at the
end of a word, or which sounds can be adjacent to each other within a word.

Phonological sequences are an important part of understanding how languages are

structured and how they differ from one another.

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Listening Process of Function/Content words
On encountering a function
word, a listener only needs to
match the word to a
phonological sequence which is
stored in the mind.
Compare the different processes
that a listener goes through:
On encountering a content
word, a listener not only has to
find a match in the phonological
store but also has to access the
meaning of the word.

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Contents of a Lexical Entry

What information do we need in order to be able to recognize

and understand an item of vocabulary when we encounter it in
speech or writing?

As we have just seen, a lexical entry for a content word must

provide information of two different types - it must tell us
about
• form and about
• meaning.
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Lexical Entry
• One model (Levelt 1989)
suggests that a lexical entry is
composed as shown here.
• Let us consider each of the
components in turn.

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Form
Phonological/Orthographic information Form and Meaning
We need some kind of mental representation of a
word against which we can match any example of
the word that we encounter.

This stored information will obviously vary according

to modality. If we are dealing with speech, we need
a phonological model of the word; if we are dealing
with reading, we will need an orthographic one.

We can assume that the two are closely related, and

are connected to the same unit of meaning. So
forms of the word GIVE might be linked in this way:

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Form
In fact, the situation is not quite as simple as this account suggests.

Both phonological and orthographic representations have to allow for variation.

They have to take account of the fact that a speaker may have any one of a number of regional accents
or that a written text may appear in any one of a number of different typefaces.

In addition, there is the issue of homonymy.

There is a single phonological and orthographic representation of the word LIKE, but it must be
connected to two entirely different entries, as in:
• I LIKE ice-cream . She looks LIKE my sister.

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Homonymy
Homonymy is a
linguistic Homophones: Words that have the same
phenomenon pronunciation, but different meanings and
where two or spellings, such as "to," "two," and "too."
more words
have the same
pronunciation
or spelling, but Homographs: Words that have the same spelling,
different
meanings. but different meanings and pronunciations, such
Homonyms can as "tear" (as in crying) and "tear" (as in ripping).
be classified
into two types:
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Homonymy
• Homonymy can lead to confusion and ambiguity in communication,
especially in written language, where context is not always clear.
• To overcome this, speakers and writers can use different strategies
such as
• rephrasing,
• using clarifying words or gestures, or
• using different spellings or pronunciations to disambiguate the intended
meaning of the homonym.

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Derivational morphology
• Derivational morphology is a branch of morphology, which is the
study of how words are formed in a language.
• Derivational morphology is concerned with the formation of new
words by adding morphemes to existing words to create derivatives
that may have different meanings, parts of speech, or grammatical
functions.

• In English, for example, the derivational suffix "-ness" can be added to

the adjective "happy" to form the noun "happiness." This process
changes the part of speech of the word from an adjective to a noun
and also changes the meaning of the word.
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Derivational Morphology
• Derivational morphology can also involve the use of prefixes, such as
"un-" or "re-," which can change the meaning of the base word.
• For example, the prefix "un-" can be added to "happy" to form "unhappy,"
which has the opposite meaning.

• Derivational morphology is an important aspect of language, as it

allows speakers to create new words and expand their vocabulary. It
is also used to form complex words that are essential in many
technical and scientific fields.

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Inflectional Morphology
• Inflectional morphology is a branch of morphology, which is the study
of how words are formed in a language.
• Inflectional morphology is concerned with the modification of words
to indicate various grammatical information, such as tense, number,
case, and gender.
• In English, for example, the inflectional morpheme "-ed" can be added to the
base form of a verb to indicate past tense, such as "walked" or "talked."
Similarly, the inflectional morpheme "-s" can be added to the end of a noun
to indicate plural, such as "cats" or "dogs."

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Inflectional Morphology
• Inflectional morphology is different from derivational morphology,
which involves creating new words by adding morphemes to existing
words. Inflectional morphology does not change the fundamental
meaning of the word, but rather modifies it to indicate a different
grammatical function.
• Inflectional morphology is an important aspect of language, as it
allows speakers to express a range of grammatical information using a
relatively small set of morphemes. It is also used to distinguish
between different parts of speech and to create complex sentence
structures.
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Morphological Information
• In order to use a word, we need to know how to modify it when, for
example, we want to refer to more than one item or to place an event
in the past.
• So we need to store information on the entire range of inflections
associated with the word. For GIVE, we would need:

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Derivational Morphology
Besides inflectional morphology,

we also need to store information on the derivational morphology of a

word. Part of the lexical entry for the word HAPPY must be an
indication that we form the opposite by adding UN- and not IN- or DIS-:
This, as we will see, is a controversial area. Some commentators argue
that the whole word UNHAPPY is stored; others that there is simply a
link between HAPPY and the prefix UN-.
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Meaning

The meaning
component of a
lexical entry is
sometimes
referred to as its
lemma.

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Syntax - Lema
It might seem strange that the lemma includes syntactic information about a word.

However, this reflects current approaches to grammar which see vocabulary and
grammar as closely linked.

Using the example of GIVE, the lexical entry would need to contain information on
word class (GIVE = a verb) to enable the word to be used in generating sentences.

It would also need to include information on the types of syntactic structure that
are associated with the word:

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Syntax - Lema
Give (_ NP, NP) (_ NP, to + NP)
• This tells us that, once we choose to construct a sentence around the
verb GIVE, we commit ourselves to using one of the two sentence
patterns shown:
give (Mary) (a present) or give (a present) to (Mary).
• The entry can contain further semantic information about what we
could appropriately fit into each of the NP slots.
• It might tell us that, in the 'NP, NP’ pattern, the first NP has to be a
recipient (probably animate) while the second NP is a gift (probably
inanimate).
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Range of Senses
• The lemma attaches meaning to the word.
• This is not as simple as it sounds, and it might be better to think of the
lemma as containing a range of meanings. Consider the fact that:
• One word may have several linked senses. Compare different meanings of
TURN in:
• I turned the corner.
• Turn over the page.
• The room turned cold.
• Our interpretation of a particular word may also vary according to context.
• Compare the meaning of the word SURGERY as used in relation to a doctor
and to a surgeon.

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Range of Senses
The issue of word meaning is complicated further by the fact that most words do not refer
to single objects in the real world, but represent a whole class of objects or actions.

It is not too difficult to explain how meaning can be attached to the expression the moon
because what is involved is a one-to-one relationship.

The expression refers to a single entity which forms part of our knowledge of our
environment.

It is much less easy to explain how in everyday speech we manage to use categories such
as DOG or JUMP.
• Where does a DOG end and a WOLF begin ☺?
• What is the difference between JUMPING and LEAPING?

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Lexical Storage – ‘No word is an island’
• There are two extremely important issues here, so far as lexical storage is
concerned:
• a The area of meaning covered by any given word is heavily influenced by the
existence of other words alongside it.
• We can only fully understand how to use the word HAPPY if we recognize the existence of
alternatives such as CONTENT or PLEASED or DELIGHTED which limit the semantic boundaries
within which HAPPY operates.
• The conclusion to be drawn is that there are very close links between
lexical entries which fall within a particular area of meaning.
• Only in this way would we be able to select exactly the item we needed
and rule out others. To put it simply, 'No word is an island': the meaning of
word X is very much determined by its relationship to Word Y and Word Z.

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Categorizing the World Around Us
• b The area of meaning that we associate with a word is heavily
dependent upon the way in which we categorize the world around
us.
• To give an example, English uses one verb to be, but Spanish has two
(temporary being vs permanent being) and Portuguese has three.
• A major area of research in psycholinguistics attempts to establish the
nature of the categories that we form, and how they become
established in the process of acquiring our first language.

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A Complete Lexical Entry
• The description above should have given you some idea of what a
complete lexical entry needs to contain. The entry for the word GIVE
might include the following:

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Activity
• Now suggest what you would expect to find in a lexical entry for the following items:

TELL AFRAID ACCUSE END (noun)

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Assignment

Write a
note on
‘Knowing
a word’.

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Thank
You

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References
• Field, J. (2004). Psycholinguistics: The key concepts.
Psychology Press.

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