Lexicon

The lexicon is a collection of words. In theoretical linguistics, the term mental lexicon is used to refer to the component of the grammar that contains the knowledge that speakers and hearers have about the words in a language. This typically covers the acoustic or graphic makeup of the word, its meaning, and its contextual or syntactic properties, which are encoded as part of the lexical entry in linguistics and lexicography (see Properties of the Lexical Entry and Structure of the Lexical Entry and Lexical Structures. Until relatively recently, the lexicon was viewed as the most passive module of grammar in the service of other, more dynamic and genuinely generative components, such as syntax and morphology. In the last fifty years, different linguistic theories have progressively increased the amount and, more importantly, the complexity of information associated with lexical items. Many of them explicitly argue that the lexicon is a dynamic module of grammar, which incorporates as well as dictates essential components of syntactic and semantic interpretation. One of the main issues facing present-day lexical research is that, in spite of the growing interest in lexical issues and significant progress achieved by different frameworks, there is no unified theory of the lexicon, but rather many different, often compatible and even overlapping, partial models of the lexicon. This is the result of each framework (or family of frameworks) defending its own vision of the lexicon, and also of the inherently intricate nature of the word, involving other components of grammar: semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Of course, the lexicon and the studies dealing with its different facets cannot be embraced in full in a review chapter like the present one. To narrow its scope, we chose the most prominent research issues and frameworks of the last few decades. This article focuses on the literature dealing with the interaction of the lexicon with syntax (cf. Lexicon in Syntactic Frameworks and Compositionality in the Mapping from the Lexicon to Syntax) and semantics (cf. Lexicon in Semantic Frameworks), on the structure and properties of the lexical entry (Properties of the Lexical Entry and Structure of the Lexical Entry and Lexical Structures), and on the general structure of the lexicon (in General Architecture of the Lexicon). It also includes basic pointers to references dealing with computational lexicons (in Lexical Databases and Computational Lexicons). This entry uses adapted materials from the authors’ joint book, Pustejovsky and Batiukova 2019, cited under General Overviews and Textbooks.