Lexical item Totally Explained

Everything about The Lexical Item totally explained

The lexical items in a language are both the single words (vocabulary) and sets of words organized into groups, units or "chunks". Some examples of lexical items from English are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by the way", and "don't count your chickens before they hatch". Lexical items are generally understood to convey a single meaning or concept, much as a lexeme does, but are not limited to being just words. Lexical chunks are somewhat like semes in that they're the "natural units" employed when translating from one language to another, or in learning a new language. In this last sense, it's sometimes said that language consists of grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar. The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis; the origin and importance of lexical units is discussed in greater detail in that article.
Lexical items are also sometimes called gambits, lexical phrases, lexical units, lexicalized stems or speech formulae. The term polyword listemes is also sometimes used. Common types of lexical chunks include:

Words, for example "cat", "tree"
Phrasal verbs, such as "put off" or "get out"
Polywords, for example "by the way", "inside out"
Collocations, for example "motor vehicle", "absolutely convinced"
Institutionalized utterances. for example "I'll get it", "We'll see", "That'll do", "If I were you ...", "Would you like a cup of coffee?"
Idioms, for example "break a leg", "... was one whale of a ...", "a bitter pill to swallow".
Sentence frames and heads, for example "That isn't as ... as you think", "The fact/suggestion/problem/danger was ..."
Text frames, for example "In this paper we explore ...; Firstly ...; Secondly ...; Finally ..."

An associated concept is that of noun-modifier semantic relations, wherein certain word pairings have a standard interpretation. For example, the phrase "cold virus" is generally understood to refer to the virus causes a cold, rather than a virus that's cold. The correct semantic relation here's that of causality (the virus causing the cold) as opposed to quality (the virus having the property of being cold).

Further Information

Get more info on 'Lexical Item'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://lexical_item.totallyexplained.com">Lexical item Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.