What is lexicon?

What Does lexicon Mean

The concept of lexicon contains several meanings, all linked to the world of linguistics . Lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or a region , the dictionary of a language or the wealth of idioms and voices of an author .

Let's see below some example sentences: "That is not the appropriate vocabulary for a ten-year-old girl" , "A professional in communication sciences must handle a vocabulary according to their social responsibility" , "The vocabulary of current adolescents it seems to be limited to a few words ” .

Grammar defines a category or lexical class as a well-defined group of words, which have the particularity of referring to certain concepts , whether abstract or material, and which have a meaning independent of their context. These types of words are usually classified according to their behavior at a morphological or syntactic level. Verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives belong to this class, which are considered subclassifications of it.
Unlike the grammatical categories, it is an open group, since the possibility of future changes in its members is contemplated, as well as the incorporation of new components and exchanges between different languages, very common in the current era of communication. . When a society needs a new word to refer to a concept, a phenomenon, an object or an idea that has recently appeared in its culture, a new term is born that has semantic content and automatically enters the group of lexical categories of the language to which it belongs.
The term lexicon is used to refer to the complete group of words that contemplate the different lexical categories of the same language. Taking into account all the languages ​​on the planet, it can be said that the verb and the noun represent the most widely used classes . However, it is important to note that each language conceives these types of words in a very particular way. For Japanese, for example, there is more than one type of adjective and, unlike Spanish or English, they can be conjugated; This means that the terms "cold", "blue" or "expensive" have an affirmative and a negative form, both with their respective variations for the past and the present.
Continuing with the peculiarities of the lexical categories in the thousands of languages ​​spoken in the world, both Chinese, Korean and Japanese use nominal classifiers, a type of word that accompanies, for example, the counting of a noun, getting in the way between this and a number; While in Spanish we can say "three pencils" and "three sheets" just by putting the number before the noun , in Japanese it is necessary to use a different classifier (in this case, a counter) in each case, which underlines certain characteristics of each element , as if we were to say "three pencils conical shaped objects " and "three flat leaf objects ".

There are several groups that can be formed from the lexicon. The heritage lexicon is known as one that evolves within the same language, while the loan lexicon is one that includes foreign words .
The passive lexicon , on the other hand, is the one that is part of the speaker's understanding. The active lexicon , on the other hand, is used in everyday speech. The jargon is the lexicon that includes the vocabulary of a particular social group.
The discipline of linguistics that is responsible for analyzing the theoretical principles of the lexicon and its composition technique is known as lexicography . Its objective is to explain the lexical units of a language . There is also lexicology , another discipline in the same field, although its function is limited to systematically compiling these lexical units.

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