Lexicalization

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In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon.

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Whether word formation and lexicalization refer to the same process is controversial within the field of linguistics. Most linguists agree that there is a distinction, but there are many ideas of what the distinction is. [1] Lexicalization may be simple, for example borrowing a word from another language, or more involved, as in calque or loan translation, wherein a foreign phrase is translated literally, as in marché aux puces, or in English, flea market.

Other mechanisms include compounding, abbreviation, and blending. [2] Particularly interesting from the perspective of historical linguistics is the process by which ad hoc phrases become set in the language, and eventually become new words (see lexicon). Lexicalization contrasts with grammaticalization, and the relationship between the two processes is subject to some debate.

In psycholinguistics

In psycholinguistics, lexicalization is the process of going from meaning to sound in speech production. The most widely accepted model, speech production, in which an underlying concept is converted into a word, is at least a two-stage process.

First, the semantic form (which is specified for meaning) is converted into a lemma, which is an abstract form specified for semantic and syntactic information (how a word can be used in a sentence), but not for phonological information (how a word is pronounced). The next stage is the lexeme, which is phonologically specified. [3]

Some recent work has challenged this model, suggesting for example that there is no lemma stage, and that syntactic information is retrieved in the semantic and phonological stages. [4]

In sign languages

One way sign languages adopt new words is through fingerspelling, but in some cases these borrowings undergo a systemic transformation in form and meaning to become what are referred to as 'lexicalized signs' [5] or 'loan signs.' These manual borrowings can act the same as other signs and can undergo regularly morphological changes. [6] For example, regular, predictable changes may be made to hand shape and palm orientation. Similarly, movement and location of the sign may add grammatical information. Letters may also be elided or omitted. [5] [7] Lexicalized signs may also be developed from gestures related to handling an object. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantics</span> Study of meaning in language

Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.

Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of transformational grammar which was current in the late 1970s. It mainly focuses on syntax, including its relation with morphology and semantics. There has been little LFG work on phonology.

Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the sign. It uses a uniform formalism and is organized in a modular way which makes it attractive for natural language processing.

Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.

In linguistics, coercion is a term applied to a process of reinterpretation triggered by a mismatch between the semantic properties of a selector and the semantic properties of the selected element. As Catalina Ramírez explains it, this phenomenon is called coercion because the process forces meaning into a lexical phrase where there is otherwise a discrepancy of the semantic aspects of the phrase. The term was first used in the semantic literature in 1988 by Marc Moens and Mark Steedman, who adopted it due to its "loose analogy with type-coercion in programming languages.” In his written framework of the generative lexicon, Pustejovsky (1995:111) defines coercion as "a semantic operation that converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function, where it would otherwise result in a type error."

In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biolinguistics</span> Study of the biology and evolution of language

Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to explain the formation of language. It is important as it seeks to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This field was first introduced by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. It was first introduced in 1971, at an international meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biolinguistics, also called the biolinguistic enterprise or the biolinguistic approach, is believed to have its origins in Noam Chomsky's and Eric Lenneberg's work on language acquisition that began in the 1950s as a reaction to the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm. Fundamentally, biolinguistics challenges the view of human language acquisition as a behavior based on stimulus-response interactions and associations. Chomsky and Lenneberg militated against it by arguing for the innate knowledge of language. Chomsky in 1960s proposed the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as a hypothetical tool for language acquisition that only humans are born with. Similarly, Lenneberg (1967) formulated the Critical Period Hypothesis, the main idea of which being that language acquisition is biologically constrained. These works were regarded as pioneers in the shaping of biolinguistic thought, in what was the beginning of a change in paradigm in the study of language.

Language production is the production of spoken or written language. In psycholinguistics, it describes all of the stages between having a concept to express and translating that concept into linguistic forms. These stages have been described in two types of processing models: the lexical access models and the serial models. Through these models, psycholinguists can look into how speeches are produced in different ways, such as when the speaker is bilingual. Psycholinguists learn more about these models and different kinds of speech by using language production research methods that include collecting speech errors and elicited production tasks.

Speech production is the process by which thoughts are translated into speech. This includes the selection of words, the organization of relevant grammatical forms, and then the articulation of the resulting sounds by the motor system using the vocal apparatus. Speech production can be spontaneous such as when a person creates the words of a conversation, reactive such as when they name a picture or read aloud a written word, or imitative, such as in speech repetition. Speech production is not the same as language production since language can also be produced manually by signs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Bybee</span> American linguist

Joan Lea Bybee is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, and phonology. Bybee is best known for proposing the theory of usage-based phonology and for her contributions to cognitive and historical linguistics.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

In psychology, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production. A lemma represents a specific meaning but does not have any specific sounds that are attached to it.

The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding the word store of a language user, such as their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic characteristics. The mental lexicon is used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical, or word, representations. However, there is some disagreement as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct.

The Integrational theory of language is the general theory of language that has been developed within the general linguistic approach of integrational linguistics.

References

  1. Lipka, Leonhard (January 1992). "Lexicalization and Institutionalization in English and German" (PDF). Linguistica Pragensia: 1–13. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
  2. Talmy, Leonard (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
  3. Harley, T. (2005) The Psychology of Language. Hove; New York: Psychology Press: 359
  4. Caramazza, A. (1997) How many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 14, 177-208.
  5. 1 2 Boinis, S.; Gajewski Mickelson, P.; Gordon, P.; Krouse, L.S.; Swabey, L (1996). Self-paced Modules for Educational Interpreter Skill Development: Fingerspelling. Little Canada, Minnesota: Minnesota Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. pp. F-12, F-14.
  6. Bellugi, Ursula; Newkirk, Don (1981). "Formal Devices for Creating New Signs in American Sign Language". Sign Language Studies. Spring 1981 (30): 4. JSTOR   26203610.
  7. Neidle, Carol; Poole Nash, Joan Cottle (2015). "American Sign Language". In Bakken Jepsen, Julie; De Clerck, Goedele; Lutalo-Kiingi, Sam; McGregor, William B. (eds.). Sign Languages of the World: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Inc. & Ishara Press. p. 38. doi:10.1515/9781614518174-007. ISBN   978-1-61451-796-2.
  8. Leeson, Lorraine; Saeed, John I.; Grehan, Carmel (2015). "Irish Sign Language (ISL)". Sign Languages of the World: A Comparative Handbook. p. 462. doi:10.1515/9781614518174-024.