LEXICAL ENTRY

The information that is stored in the mind concerning a particular lexical item. Levelt (1989) represents a lexical entry as consisting of two parts, one related to form and one (the lemma) related to meaning and use.

‘Form’ includes:

 a. Mental representations of the item which enable it to be identified when it is encountered. There must be a phonological representation against which a spoken stimulus can be matched, and an orthographic representation for decoding the item when it occurs in written form. We can assume that the two are closely connected and linked to the same unit of meaning. However, both phonological and orthographic representations have to allow for variation– the fact that a speaker may have any one of a number of accents or that a written text may appear in any one of a number of different typefaces.

b. Information on the morphology of the item– both inflectional (providing a plural for a noun or a past tense form for a verb) and derivational (indicating the component parts of a word such as UN-HAPPI-NESS). This is a contentious area. Evidence suggests that inflected items may be assembled from their parts: WALKS and WALKED would be constructed from WALK. However, the evidence on derivational structure is not so clear.

The lemma of an entry includes:

 a. Information on the syntactic structures in which the item features. This reflects current approaches to grammar which view vocabulary and grammar as closely linked. The lexical entry needs to contain information on word class to enable the word to be used in generating sentences. It also needs to include information on the types of syntactic structure that are associated with the word. Thus, the entry for GIVE might include GIVE + NP (noun phrase) + NP and GIVE + NP + to + NP, indicating that, once we choose to construct a sentence around the verb GIVE, we commit ourselves to using one of two sentence patterns: give Mary a present or give a present to Mary. The entry contains additional semantic information about what fits into each of the NP slots. It might tell us that, in the GIVE + NP + NP pattern, the first NP has to be a recipient (probably animate) and the second NP has to be a gift (probably inanimate).

b. A range of senses for the word. The issue of word meaning is complicated by the fact that many words do not refer to single objects in the real world, but represent a whole class of objects or actions. There are two important issues here, so far as lexical storage is concerned. Firstly, the area of meaning covered by any given word is heavily influenced by the existence of other words alongside it. We can only fully understand how to use the word HAPPY if we recognise the existence of alternatives such as CONTENT or PLEASED or DELIGHTED, which limit the semantic boundaries within which HAPPY operates. There must be very close links between lexical entries that fall within a particular area of meaning; only in this way are we able to select exactly the item we need and rule out others. Secondly, the area of meaning that we associate with a word is heavily dependent upon the way in which we categorise the world around us. A major area of research in psycholinguistics attempts to establish the nature of the categories that we form, and how they become established in the process of acquiring our first language.

Note that ‘lexical access’ refers to items which carry lexical meaning. The position of function words is not entirely clear.

See also: Lexical access, Lexical storage, Morphology: storage, Word primitive

Further reading: Aitchison (2003); Levelt (1989)

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Image schemas