Lexicon

Lore & Background

Items in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic but contain phonological and morphological components. Lexemes are grouped into lemmas, which are sets generated by inflectional morphology; lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords listing citation forms and irregular forms. Lexemes derived by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas. The lexicon is organized into open categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) with active generation mechanisms, and closed categories (e.g., determiners, pronouns) that rarely gain new lexemes. A central role of the lexicon is documenting established lexical norms. Lexicalization is the process by which new words, having gained widespread usage, enter the lexicon. This process may modify lexemes phonologically and morphologically, sometimes producing doublets—pairs from a single etymological source that are often close semantically, such as 'frail' versus 'fragile.' Mechanisms for lexical change include innovation, borrowing, compounding, abbreviation, acronyms, inflection, derivation, and agglutination. Neologisms are new lexeme candidates that, if they gain wide usage over time, become part of a language's lexicon. They are often introduced by children producing erroneous forms, as well as through slang and advertising. Borrowings that retain the sound of the source language include guestwords (unassimilated borrowings that retain the original pronunciation and spelling), foreignisms (phonetically adapted borrowings that still feel foreign), and loanwords (totally assimilated borrowings that follow the target language's phonology and morphology). Borrowings using target language material while resembling the source sound include phono-semantic matching, semanticized phonetic matching, and phonetic matching.

Reader's Guide

The concept of the lexicon is fundamental to understanding how languages store and organize words. It provides the raw material—the wordstock—that grammar operates on to produce sentences. The distinction between open and closed categories explains why languages readily adopt new nouns and verbs but rarely new pronouns or determiners. Lexicalization and neologism mechanisms show how languages grow and adapt over time, whether through internal innovation, borrowing from other languages, or compounding existing elements. The study of the lexicon also encompasses how words relate to concepts, how they are accessed in the mind, and how their phonology, syntax, and meaning intersect. For multilingual speakers, each language is generally considered to have its own lexicon, though speakers of language variants (e.g., Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese) may be seen as sharing a single lexicon. The lexicon remains a central topic in linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics, with ongoing research into its organization and retrieval processes.

Did You Know?

• The word 'lexicon' derives from the Greek λεξικόν (lexikon), meaning 'of or for words.'
• A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology, represented in dictionaries by headwords.
• Doublets are pairs from a single etymological source that are often close semantically, such as 'frail' and 'fragile.'
• Neologisms are often introduced by children who produce erroneous forms by mistake.