lexical corpus n
a collection of words for purposes of language analysis. Many lexical
corpora contain millions of words that can be analyzed by a computer.
see also corpus
lexical decision taskn
a psycholinguistic task that involves measuring how quickly people can
classify stimuli as words or nonwords, which has been used in thousands of
studies investigating semantic memory and lexical access.
see also priming
lexical density n
also Type-Token Ratio, concept load
a measure of the ratio of different words to the total number of words in a
text, sometimes used as a measure of the difficulty of a passage or text.
Lexical density is normally expressed as a percentage and is calculated by
the formula:
Lexical density =¥ 100For example, the lexical density of this definition is:¥ 100 =50.88see also typelexical entry n
a term used in transformational generative grammarfor a word or
phrase listed in the lexicon (see lexicon^3 ) of the grammar.
The information given in a lexical entry usually includes:
a its pronunciation (see distinctive feature)
b its meaning, which may be given in a formalized way, e.g. (+human)
(+male) (see semantic features)
c its lexical category, e.g. n(oun), v(erb), a(djective)
d other linguistic items it may co-occur with in a sentence, e.g. whether or
not a verb can be followed by an object (see object^1 )
In later models of TG Grammar, a lexical entry would also contain semantic
roles such as agent, patient and goal which can be assigned to noun phrases
in the sentence (see q-theory).
see also projection principle
lexical corpusnumber of separate words
total number of words in the text29 separate words
57 total words