15 unit 4

Terms in Morphology
Thennarasu Sakkan

Lexicon /ˈlɛksɪkən/
In its most general sense, the terms is synonyms with
VOCABULARY.
A dictionary can be seen as a set of lexical
ENTRIES.

Lexicon is the set of all the words and idioms of any
language.
Lexicon is a dictionary, usually of an ancient
language such as Latin, Greek or Tamil.
The lexicon has a special status in GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR, where it refers to the COMPONENT
containing all the information about the
STRUCTURAL properties of the LEXICAL ITEMS in
a language.

Lexicon is a mental system which contains all the
information a person knows about words.
According to psycholinguists, people’s knowledge of
a word includes
a. knowing how a word is pronounced
b. the grammatical patterns with which a word is
used
c. the meaning or meanings of the word.

The total set of words a speaker knows from his or
her mother tongue is called mental lexicon.
The content of the mental lexicon and how a
mental lexicon is developed are studied in
psycholinguistics and language acquisition.

Lexis /ˈlɛksɪs/
Lexis is the vocabulary of a language in contrast to
its grammar (syntax).
Lexis is the vocabulary of a language, as distinct from
its grammar; the total stock of words and idiomatic
combinations of them in a language; lexicon.
In generative linguistics, a lexis or lexicon is the
complete set of all possible words in a language
(vocabulary).
In this sense, child, children, child's and children's are
four different words in the English lexicon.

A book that lists words in groups of synonyms and
related concepts.
Thesaurus /θɪˈsɔːrəs/

Lexical Items/Lexical Unit/Lexical entry
In lexicography, a lexical item (or lexical unit/ LU, lexical
entry) is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of
words that forms the basic elements of a language's
lexicon (≈ vocabulary).
Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way,
and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be
generally understood to convey a single meaning, much
as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words.
Lexical items composed of more than one word are also
sometimes called lexical chunks, gambits, lexical phrases,
lexical units, lexicalized stems.

Lexeme also called lexical item
A lexeme is an abstract unit.
Lexeme is the smallest unit in the meaning system of
a language that can be distinguished from other
similar units.
It can occur in many different forms in actual spoken
or written sentences, and is regarded as the same
lexeme even when inflected.
For example, in English, all inflected forms such as
give, gives, given, giving, gave would belong to the
one lexeme give.

Similarly, such expressions as bury the hatchet,
hammer and tongs, give up, and white paper (in the
sense of a government document) would each be
considered a single lexeme.
In a dictionary, each lexeme merits a separate entry
or sub-entry.

Compound word is a combination of two or more
words which functions as a single word.
For example self-made (a compound adjective) as in
‘He was a self-made man’ and flower shop (a
compound noun) as in ‘They went to the flower
shop.’
Compound Word
Compound words are written either as a single word
(e.g. headache), as hyphenated words (e.g. self-
government), or as two words (e.g. police station).

Endocentric Compound:
A compound that consists of a head and a dependent
(or several dependents); the meaning of the semantic
head is a hyponym of the meaning of the entire
compound.
For example;
English word footpath, composed of the two nouns
foot and path or they may belong to different parts of
speech.
English word blackbird, composed of the adjective
black and the noun bird.

Compounds with a heard are called endocentric
compounds.
The term 'endocentric' means that the category of
the whole (syntactic or mophological) construction
is identical to that of one of its constituents.

Exocentric Compound:
A compound pattern that does not contain a
(semantic) head and a dependent.
For example, the English compound white-collar is
neither a kind of collar nor a white thing.
white-collar - the people who work in an office.
pickpocket - a person who steals from people's
pockets.
redskin – native American in US

In excocentric compounds, without a constituent
that functions as its head.
The exocentricity of these compounds cannot be
explained in terms of semantic interpretation in the
same way as baldhead, because they behave
formally as adjectives, although there is no
adjectival head.

A special class of compounds is formed by
copulative compounds.
For examples; (Sanskrit and Punjabi)
candra - ditya-u
moon-sun (dual) the moon and the sun
raat-din 'day and night'
maa-pio 'mother and father'
sukh-dukh 'happiness and sorrow'

killjoy - a person who deliberately spoils the
enjoyment of others.
Scarecrow- an object made to resemble a human
figure, set up to scare birds away from a field where
crops are growing.

WordNet
WordNet is a large lexical database of English.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped
into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each
expressing a distinct concept.
Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-
semantic and lexical relations.
WordNet is also freely and publicly available for
download.

WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it
groups words together based on their meanings.
However, there are some important distinctions.
First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms -
strings of letters - but specific senses of words.

Generative Lexicon
The generative lexicon (shortly GL) presents a novel and
exciting theory of lexical semantics that addresses the
problem of the “multiplicity of word meaning”- that is,
how we are able to give an infinite number of senses to
words with finite means.
As the first formally elaborated theory of generative
approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an
implemented computational treatment of word meaning
that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.

In contrast to static view of word meaning (where each word
is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses)
that imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance
capability of any natural language processing, Pustejovsky
proposes that the lexicon becomes an active and central
component in the linguistic description.
The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions
generatively, first by providing a rise and expressive
vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then by
developing a frame work for manipulating fine-grained
distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a
set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of
such description of words, as they occur in context, extended
and novel senses are generated.

There is rising interest in computational analysis of Machine
Readable Dictionaries (MRDs) as a lexical resource for various
purposes in the recent years (Wilsk et al, 1996:161-181).
Existing dictionaries are obvious place to look for extensive
linguistic information on lexical semantics.
Exploiting MRDs for semantic analysis is a clear-cut effort,
which aims at harvesting the work-years of effort by
professional lexicographers.
It is a well-known fact that a wealth of implicit information
lies within dictionaries.

1. Headword - அம்மா
2. Definition/Meaning
3. Word Class - like noun, verb etc.
4. Word Pronunciation
5. Transliteration/IPA transcription
6. More than one category - like படி as n, v, etc
7. Inflectional or paradigm -like அம்மாவை, அம்மாவுக்கு,
அம்மாைால், அம்மாவுக்காக, அம்மாைிலிருந்து
8. How frequent the word is - 45234
9. If word has more than one meaning - like தாய், அன்வை,
ஆய் etc.
10. Derived word - குதிவை from குதி,
11. Citation - How word is used in sentence example
12. Etymology of the word
13. Picture of the word

15 unit 4

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15 unit 4