Lexicon: Structure, Word Formation, and Meaning Shifts
Lexicon: Structure, Word Formation, and Meaning
The lexicon is much more structured than dictionaries; it has links between phonological forms and meanings. It contains all signs whose meaning is not predictable, whether they are single morphemes, words, or combinations of words. It includes words, root morphemes, derived stems, irregular inflected forms, morphologically complex words, and idioms. Regular inflected forms are not included; their meanings are predictable given English morphology.
Openness of the Lexicon
The lexicon is not fixed; it changes rapidly due to social and technological changes, language contact because of multilingualism, and the tabooing of words. Even grammatical morphemes change.
Parts of Speech
Traditionally defined by meaning, parts of speech are now defined by grammatical behavior. Not all words pattern the same way, and there are sufficient commonalities among some groups of words to allow us to make generalizations about them:
- Nouns: Specify things and entities, have the ability to inflect for number, and take modifiers.
- Adjectives: Specify qualities or properties of things.
- Pronouns: Grammatical morphemes that form closed classes that can’t normally be added to.
- Verbs: Specify events. Inflect for tense, person, and number of the subject.
- Auxiliaries: Verbs that express grammatical (not lexical) information.
- Adverbs: Qualities or properties of events.
- Prepositions: Go with nouns to specify how they are related to the rest of the sentence.
- Conjunctions: Words like “and” and “but” that join words or groups of words.
- Interjections: Words like “hey!” and “erk!” that specify the speaker’s emotional attitude or call for attention.
Creating New Words
- Clipping: Shortening an existing word of more than one syllable, generally to a single syllable (e.g., ad, condo, flu, Steve).
- Hypocorism: For example, telly (television), barbie (barbecue).
- Acronyming: Using the first letters of a string of words (e.g., RAM, ROM, EU).
- Blending: Combining parts of two separate words to form a single one (e.g., motel, bit, modem).
- Borrowing: Incorporating words from another language (loanwords, loan translations).
- Coinage: Creating completely new words (e.g., nerd, barf).
- Phonoaesthesia: Sounds become associated with meaning, often partially iconic (e.g., sl-, gl-).
Old Forms, New Meanings
- Derivation: Adding derivational morphemes (denominal, deadjectival).
- Compounding: Joining two separate words together to form a single word (e.g., loanword).
- Reduplication: Repeating an existing word (e.g., fifty-fifty, hush-hush).
- Backformation: Creating a shorter word from a longer one by removing a part that is wrongly taken to be an existing morpheme (e.g., incise from incision, burger from hamburger).
- Meaning Extension: Extending the meaning of an existing word, broadening it to embrace new senses (e.g., holiday, Kleenex).
- Meaning Narrowing: The reverse of meaning extension (e.g., doctor, meat).
Fixed Expressions
- Idioms: Fixed and unpredictable; thus, they need to be listed separately in our lexicons (e.g., come down to earth, from the old school, every dog has its day).
- Collocations: Habitual word combinations with fully predictable meaning and fixed order. Pairings are unpredictable (e.g., strong coffee/liquor, *hard coffee/liquor; on the radio/on TV).
- Euphemisms: Ways to avoid being offensive by being evasive (e.g., toilet to loo, girl of the streets to prostitute).
- Dysphemisms: Replacing a neutral term with a harsher one or changing meanings with harsher ones (e.g., toilet to shithouse, slut, cunt).