Linguistic Information

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Lexicon is a linguistic tapestry which incorporates ones total literal as well as cultural vocabulary

Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. The lexicon includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes. In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker's mind: First, it organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical network) and second, it contains a generative device producing (new) simple and complex words according to certain lexical rules. For example, the suffix '-able' can be added to transitive verbs only, so that we get 'read-able' but not '*cry-able' When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words (i.e. etymology), types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.

Lexeme
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN. A related concept is the lemma (or citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way.

A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme RUN has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person-singular form run (which also functions as the past participle and non-finite form), a past form ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners, runnable, etc.) The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar; in the case of English verbs such as RUN, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence.

A lexicon consists of lexemes.

In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements they occur with in sentences and other syntactic structures.

The notion of a lexeme is very central to morphology, and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes.
 :Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.
 :Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.

Decomposition
Lexemes are often composed of smaller units with individual meaning called morphemes, according to root morpheme + derivational morphemes + desinence (not necessarily in this order), where,
 :The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents.
 :The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information.
 :The desinence is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information.
 :The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the stem. The decomposition stem + desinence can then be used to study inflection.

Lexical items
The lexical items in a language are both the single words (vocabulary) and sets of words organized into groups, units or "chunks". Some examples of lexical items from English are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by the way", and "don't count your chickens before they hatch". Lexical items are generally understood to convey a single meaning or concept, much as a lexeme does, but are not limited to being just words. Lexical chunks are somewhat like semes in that they are the "natural units" employed when translating from one language to another, or in learning a new language. In this last sense, it is sometimes said that language consists of grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar.

The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis.

Lexical items are also sometimes called gambits, lexical phrases, lexical units, lexicalized stems or speech formulae. The term polyword listemes is also sometimes used. Common types of lexical chunks include,
 :Words, e.g. "cat", "tree"
 :Phrasal verbs, such as "put off" or "get out"
 :Polywords, e.g. "by the way", "inside out"
 :Collocations, e.g. "motor vehicle", "absolutely convinced"
 :Institutionalized utterances. e.g. "I'll get it", "We'll see", "That'll do", "If I were you ...", "Would you like a cup of coffee?"
 :Idioms, e.g. "break a leg", "... was one whale of a ...", "a bitter pill to swallow".
 :Sentence frames and heads, e.g. "That is not as ... as you think", "The fact/suggestion/problem/danger was ..."
 :Text frames, e.g. "In this paper we explore ...; Firstly ...; Secondly ...; Finally ..."

Meronymy
Meronymy is a semantic relation used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something. That is,
 :X is a meronym of Y if Xs are parts of Y(s), or
 :X is a meronym of Y if Xs are members of Y(s).

For example, 'finger' is a meronym of 'hand' because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly 'wheel' is a meronym of 'automobile'. Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology, which specifically deals with part/whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in terms of first-order logic.

A meronym means part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym. In knowledge representation languages, meronymy is often expressed as "part-of".

Opposite- just what you would think

Sound system- list of consonants and vowels used to speak the language (I believe these are equivalent to phonemes)

Morphology- I believe this is how words are formed, like prefixes, suffixes, plural forms, combining words (for example the word for “nutrition” in Naxi is a combination of the word “eat” and “drink.”)

Syntax- I believe this describes how words are ordered and in what ways different types of words can be used. The example website has several categories including: verb phrase, noun phrase, yes and no questions, and word order.

The Swadesh List
• When looking at an under-documented language, the first set of data that linguists want to collect is called the Swadesh List. This is a list of approximately 300 basic vocabulary words.
• Information from the Swadesh list is often used by linguists to identify the basic sounds of a language.
See the full list

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