lexical field n
also semantic field
the organization of related words and expressions (see lexeme) into a system
which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms
such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, auntbelong to a lexical field
whose relevant features include generation, sex, membership of the father’s
or mother’s side of the family, etc.
The absence of a word in a particular place in a lexical field of a language is
called a lexical gap.
For example, in English there is no singular noun that covers both cow and
bull as horsecovers stallionand mare.
lexical functional grammar n
also LFG
a theory of grammar that holds that there are two parallel levels of syntactic
representation: constituent structure(c-structure), consisting of context-
free phrase structure trees, and functional structure(f-structure), consisting
of attributes such as tense and gender and functions such as subject and
object. An important difference between LFG and the Chomskyan tradition
from which it developed is that many phenomena that were treated as
transformations in the Chomskyan tradition (for example, passive vs.
active sentences) are treated in the lexicon^3 in LFG.
lexical gap n
see lexical field
lexical item n
another term for lexeme
lexical meaning n
see content word
lexical phonology n
a model of morphology and phonology and the lexicon in which the lexicon
is divided into levels or strata. Phonological rules are divided into lexical
rules, which are carried out in the lexicon and include morphological con-
ditioning, and postlexical rules, which apply across word boundaries in a
separate component order after the rules of syntax.
lexical phrases n
recurrent phrases and patterns of language use which have become institu-
tionalized through frequent use, such as “Have we met?” and “You must
be joking”.
lexical phrases