Structure of

Lexicon

Dr.VMS
Lexicon

 The lexicon contains a list of all words

(or lexemes) of a language and gives syntactic,
semantic and phonological information about each
lexical entry.
 a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of
the words in a language and their definitions :
 a French lexicon
 a Tamil lexicon
lexeme
a unit of meaning in a language, consisting of a
word or group of words
 a minimal meaningful unit of language, the
meaning of which cannot be understood from that
of its component morphemes. Take off (in the
senses to mimic, to become airborne, etc) is a
lexeme, as well as the independent morphemes
take and off.
lexeme
 a typical dictionary, will have the entries of lexemes. Most
lexemes have variations which build upon its most basic
form. Thus, the lexeme walk could vary in form, such as
in walks, walked, and walking. The lexeme slow also varies in
form: slower, slowest, slowly.
 A lexeme can thus be broken down into two large categories:
 invariable lexemes and variable lexemes.
 An invariable lexeme means that there is only one form of the
word; it isn't altered in any way for meaning. The and a are
examples of invariable lexemes.
 Variable lexemes, then, do exist in numerous forms. The
word pretty is variable, as it also takes the forms
of prettier and prettiest. The word be also takes the forms am,
is, are, was, were, being, and been.
lexeme
 lexeme consists of more than one word : pick
up, put away, pass out, and look out.
 idioms : think outside the box. change of heart,
piece of cake, cutting corners, the last straw.
Lexical items
 Lexical entries have evolved from simple pairings
of phonological forms with grammatical
categories into elaborate informa­tion structures, in
which phonological forms are now paired with
more articulated feature structure descriptions.
Lexemes and Words
 Lexeme: An abstract proto-word which gives rise
to genuine words. We refer to lexemes by their
‘dictionary form’, e.g. ‘the lexeme run’ or ‘the
lexeme dog’.

 Word: A particular pairing of form and meaning.

Running and ran are different words
 Verbal lexeme
 we handle subject-verb agreement by having the lexical
entries for certain verbs (basically, those with the suffix -
s) specify that their SPR(a subject or determiner) values
have to be third person and singular.
 Aside from that specification, these entries are essentially
identical to those for other forms of what is intuitively the
same verb: their part of speech is verb; they have the
same COMPS(complement) values; and their semantics
is virtually the same.
 This is no accident, nor is the fact that the same suffix is
used to mark almost all third-person singular present
tense verb forms.
Structure
Logical form and phonological form
LF transfer
 SHAC - Specifier-Head Agreement Constraint
 AGR- Agreement, concord
Nominal lexeme
Verbal lexeme
Verbal lexeme
Constant lexeme
Constant lexeme
Thank Youi