An Overview of the Structure of Language
-The lexicon is one of the four-part division of a language and around which almost every textbook for teaching a foreign language is organized. Textbooks usually divide the field into phonetics which give the mammals for sound, dictionaries for words, grammars for syntax and semantics for meaning. Lexicon is synonymous with the vocabulary. The lexicon lists the lexemes of the language and provide along with each lexeme all the information that is required by the rules of the grammar. We cannot claim to know the language without knowing the vocabulary.
-Two kinds of information the lexicon should contain:
(i)Syntactic information
(ii)Morphological information
In relation to syntax words in the dictionary gives information about syntactic properties. For example the word man, apart from the fact that it is a ‘noun’, we need to know that it may be preceded by a definite or indefinite article the or a (as in the man or a man), that is may be preceded by numeral as one man, three men) that it may be preceded by an adjective like (strong man, kind man) and that it can be replaced by a pronoun (he, him, who, whom). Let us look at another word in English which is ‘go’. We need to be given the information that it belongs to a subclass of intransitive verb and all the information needed for the selection and constructive of its forms (goes, going, went, gone). The mastery of such information is part of linguistic knowledge which is required from a dictionary.
-The morphological information will include the permissible combinations of prefixes, roots and suffixes which go to make up a word. Some words have one root or stem and they contain no prefixes or suffixes e.g
a, the, man, kind, hate, school, house etc while the following words are morphologically complex in the sense that they can contain prefixes and suffixes:manly (man-ly)
kindness (kind-ness)
dislike (dis-like)
unkindly (un-kind-ly)
- Lecturer : regina udaba