Lexicons

Lexicon is the collection of words and other meaningful units in a language, or in cognitive linguistics, the mental repository of a speaker’s vocabulary. It encompasses word forms, meanings, and information about how words function syntactically and morphologically. The term is distinct from grammar or syntax; the lexicon provides entries that language users draw on to combine elements into sentences.

A lexical entry typically includes the base form (lemma), pronunciation, part of speech, senses, and information about inflection or derivation. It may also record subcategorization frames, which specify the syntactic arguments of a word, as well as collocations and semantic relations such as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. In many theories, these representations are stored in the mental lexicon as interconnected entries.

Lexicons exist as external resources as well. Monolingual lexicons appear in dictionaries; bilingual or multilingual lexicons support translation and language learning. In natural language processing, computational lexicons provide lexical items and features used in tagging, parsing, and semantic interpretation, and high-level databases such as WordNet organize words by semantic relations.

Historically, lexicons have evolved from glossaries and dictionaries to extensive digital lexical databases. They document a language’s vocabulary, including neologisms, loanwords, and domain-specific terms, and vary across dialects, registers, and specialized disciplines.