LEXICAL ARRAY
(Syntax) A formal device, introduced in Chomsky 1998; a lexical array is the set of lexical items that will be used in a derivation. The notion is similar to numeration; the only difference is that the elements in a numeration bear indices, while the elements in a lexical array do not. The empirical evidence for the existence of lexical arrays comes from sentences like the following:

1. There_i is likely [_A t_i to be [a proof discovered]].
2. *There_i is likely [_A a proof to be [ t_i discovered]].

LEXICAL ASPECT

1. (Semantics) Or, Aktionsart. Part of the way in which a verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs arrive and run differ in their lexical aspect since the former describes an event which has a natural endpoint while the latter does not. Lexical aspect differs from grammatical aspect in that it is an inherent semantic property of a predicate, while grammatical aspect is a syntactic or morphological property. Although lexical aspect need not be marked morphologically, it has downstream grammatical effects, for instance that arrive can be modified by in an hour while believe cannot. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Semantics) The aspectual information provided by the lexical properties of the verbs and their predicates (Colomé 2013, Vendler 1967): punctuality, telicity, and dynamicity. According to their lexical aspect, Vendler (1967) classifies verbs and their predicates into four categories: states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements. Table 1 presents the four categories in which verbs can be classified according to their semantic features:

   	States	Activities	Accomplishments	Achievements
   Punctuality	-	-	-	+
   Telicity	-	-	+	+
   Dynamicity	-	+	+	+

    | Julio César López Otero and Alejandro Cuza, 2020

LEXICAL BUNDLE
(Discourse) We refer to the multi-word sequences that occur most commonly in a given register as "lexical bundles", defined simply as the most frequently recurring sequences of words (e.g., I don't know if, I just wanted to). Lexical bundles are usually not structurally complete and not idiomatic in meaning, but they serve important discourse functions in both spoken and written texts.
 The term "lexical bundle" was first used in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan 1999), which compared the most common recurrent sequences in conversation and academic prose. | Douglas Biber and Federica Barbieri, 2006

LEXICAL COHESION
(Text Linguistics) In text, lexical cohesion is the result of chains of related words that contribute to the continuity of lexical meaning. These lexical chains are a direct result of units of text being "about the same thing," and finding text structure involves finding units of text that are about the same thing. Hence, computing the chains is useful, since they will have a correspondence to the structure of the text. | Jane Morris and Graeme Hirstt, 1991

LEXICAL DECOMPOSITION GRAMMAR
(Semantics) Like Van Geenhoven's theory of Semantic Incorporation, Lexical Decomposition Grammar (LDG) is a semantic account. It was developed, among others, in Joppen and Wunderlich (1995) and Wunderlich (1997). Proceeding on ideas first brought up by Bierwisch (1983), it distinguishes between two levels of semantic representation: Conceptual Structure (CS), which contains all extralinguistic knowledge relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions, and Semantic Form (SF), which comprises all the semantic information that is grammatically relevant.
 In SF, lexical entries are decomposed and represented as expressions of Categorial Grammar, using the two basic types t (proposition) and e (entity). (1) shows the SF representation of the ditransitive verb show (adapted from Joppen/Wunderlich 1995). The variable s in this expression represents the situational argument, i.e. the referential argument of the verb, which is of type e. The λ-sequence mirrors the argument hierarchy, i.e. the depth of embedding in SF; it is assumed that the situational argument is the highest argument of the verb.

1. λz_eλy_eλx_eλs_e.CAUSE_{<t,<e,<e,t>>>}(x, SEE_<e,<e,t>>(y, z))(s)

2. εu.NOUN(u)

LEXICAL DIFFUSION

1. (Diachronic) The hypothesis that a sound change is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable (Crystal 2008). It contrasts with the Neogrammarian view that a sound change results from phonetically-conditioned articulatory drift acting uniformly on all applicable words, which implies that sound changes are regular, with exceptions attributed to analogy and dialect borrowing.
    Similar views were expressed by Romance dialectologists in the late 19th century but were reformulated and renamed by William Wang and coworkers studying varieties of Chinese in the 1960s and the 1970s. William Labov found evidence for both processes but argued that they operate at different levels. | Wikipedia, 2023
2. (Diachronic) Empirical investigations over the past two decades on a variety of languages, using large amounts of data, have shown that there must be a process which is implemented in a manner that is lexically gradual, diffusing across the lexicon, and in his seminal article Wang (1969) called this process lexical diffusion.
    In lexical diffusion, an innovation starts slowly, affecting relatively few words. When a certain number has been affected, the innovation, like a snowball bounding down a hill under its own impetus, gathers momentum. There comes the most active period when a large number of words is affected in a relatively short time-span. Then, the change slows down again, and tapers off at the end. When plotted on a graph, the slow start, rapid mid-stream, and tapering off towards the end show a characteristic S-curve.
    Lexical diffusion may be defined as diffusion from word to word in the language, and diffusion from speaker to speaker in the community. The change catches on gradually, both within a language, and when moving from speaker to speaker (Sturtevant 1917, Wang 1969, Milroy and Milroy 1975, Shen 1990, Aitchison 1991). We may add to the side by side progression of these two processes diffusion from site to site (Ogura 1995). Precisely the same phenomena that can be observed in the long-term macro-level dialect contact process, as macro-level reflections of face-to-face micro-level processes. The three processes of diffusion from word to word, diffusion from speaker to speaker and diffusion from site to site progress side by side. | Mieko Ogura and William S-Y. Wang, 1994

LEXICAL DIVERSITY SCORE
(Stylistics) A measurement of the breadth and variety of the vocabulary used in a piece of writing. The most basic lexical diversity measurement is called type-token ratio, or TTR. Take this sentence: The dog jumped over the other dog. This sentence contains 5 types (the, dog, jumped, over, other), and 7 tokens (or total words). So the TTR for this sentence is 5/7 or 0.714.
 Unfortunately, TTR has a major problem: it is highly sensitive to text length. The longer the document, the lower the chance that a new token will also be a new type, causing the TTR to drop as more words are added. Fortunately, several other lexical diversity measures have been created specifically to combat this issue, including the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD), the Hypergeometric Distribution D (HD-D), and Yule's I. | Ryan Fauver, 2014

LEXICAL FUNCTION GRAMMAR
(Grammar) An approach that describes an utterance in terms of several distinct representations. The constituent structure (c-structure) represents the surface constituency relationships that hold between the words of an utterance, whereas the functional structure (f-structure) represents the function-argument structure of an utterance. The c-structure is a conventional tree structure with words as its terminals, and the f-structure is a recursive attribute-value structure, which resembles the hierarchical "frame" structures used in knowledge-representation systems. C-structures are specified using context-free phrase-structure rules and lexical entries, and the associated f-structures are specified by annotations that appear on these rules and lexical entries. The f-structures associated with a given c-structure are not determined via a derivational relationship, but by constraints simultaneously imposed by the syntactic, morphological and lexical structure of the language. If there is no f-structure which simultaneously satisfies all of the constraints, then there is no f-structure for the utterance and that utterance is ill-formed. | Katherine Demuth and Mark Johnson, 1989

LEXICAL GAP
(Lexicology) Or, lacuna. An absence of a word in a particular language. Several types of lexical gaps are possible, such as untranslatability, missing inflections, or nonsense words.

• Translatability: Often a concept lexicalized in one language does not have a corresponding lexical unit in another language and thus presents a translation difficulty.
• Missing inflection: Sometimes a certain inflection of a word produces a word phonetically forbidden or awkward in a given language.
• Nonsense words: Due to phonotactics, a language may have restrictions on what kind of sounds can come in certain positions of a word. There exist nonsense words that obey all the phonotactics of a language, but yet have no meaning. A word such as bluck obeys the phonological and phonotactic rules of English, yet a meaning does not exist for it, so it is a lexical gap in English.

LEXICAL INTEGRITY PRINCIPLE

1. (Syntax) The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis is a constraint on the interface between rules/constraints of the grammar and the internal structure of complex words. Anderson is one of the morphologists who proposed that syntax has no access to word-internal morphological structure:

   Principle of Lexical Integrity (Anderson 1992)
   The syntax neither manipulates nor has access to the internal structure of words.

    In work on the interface between syntax and morphology by Ackema and Neeleman (2005), essentially the same position is defended. In their model of the grammar, sentence grammar and word grammar are different parts of the grammar that only touch each other at the level of lexical insertion where the features of syntactic nodes have to match those of (simplex or complex words).
    For example, it is necessary for a proper account of agreement phenomena for syntax to have access to the feature specification of a noun for the morpho-syntactic category Number. However, it is not relevant how this feature is expressed morphologically. For instance, for the purpose of number agreement, it does not matter whether the plural suffix of Dutch nouns is -s or -en; we only need to know if a noun is singular or plural.
    The principle of Lexical Integrity as formulated above excludes two kinds of syntax-morphology interaction:
   1. Manipulation of parts of word-internal structure.
   2. Access to word-internal structure.
    | Geert Booij, 2009
2. (Morphology) How can we tell whether a sequence of morphemes is a word? A fundamental generalization that morphologists have traditionally maintained is the lexical integrity principle, which states that words are built out of different structural elements and by different principles of composition than syntactic phrases. Specifically, the morphological constituents of words are lexical and sublexical categories—stems and affixes—while the syntactic constituents of phrases have words as the minimal, unanalyzable units; and syntactic ordering principles do not apply to morphemic structures. As a result, morphemic order is fixed, even when syntactic word order is free; the directionality of "headedness" of sublexical structures may differ from supralexical structures; and the internal structure of words is opaque to certain syntactic processes. | Joan Bresnan and Sam A. Mchombo, 1995

LEXICAL MORPHOLOGY

1. (Grammar) Or, Lexical Phonology. A theoretical model first proposed in Pesetsky (1979), and elaborated in Kiparsky (1982). Although it is impossible to say that there is a single model of Lexical Morphology, all theories have in common that the word formation rules and the phonological rules both apply in a single component of the grammar, viz. the Lexicon.
    The basic idea of Kiparsky's (1982) paper is that the cyclic application of phonological rules should follow from the organization of the lexicon.
    Each level is associated with a class of phonological rules for which it defines the domain of application. Within the lexicon, the output of a word formation rule is submitted to the phonological rules of that level. In this respect, the rules of lexical phonology are intrinsically cyclic, because they re-apply after each step of word formation at their level. (Booij and Ruback 1987, Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Halle and Mohanan 1985, Kiparsky 1982, 1985, Pesetsky 1979, Siegel 1974) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Morphology) An incontrovertible distinction between inflection and derivation is that the latter is a type of word formation that creates new lexemes in the lexicon typically through the addition of affixes, which include prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (Aronoff 1994, Plag 2003). Inflection alters words to fit in different grammatical contexts, creating new word forms, but not new lexemes. The two processes are ordered such that inflectional morphemes can be added to either a stem,

   e.g. help + ed [past] → helped,

   or a derived word,

   e.g. help + er [agentive] + s [plural] → helpers,

   but a derivational morpheme cannot be added after inflection

   e.g. help + ed [past] + er [agentive] → * helpeder.

    Unlike inflectional morphemes, derivational suffixes vary in their productivity and tend to be pickier about the types of bases to which they attach. In sum, inflection is grammatical morphology and derivation is a type of word formation, or lexical morphology. | Linda Jarmulowicz and Valentina L. Taran, 2013

LEXICAL SEMANTICS
(Semantics) Or, lexicosemantics. A subfield of linguistic semantics, the study of word meanings (Pustejovsky 2005, Taylor 2017). It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality (Pustejovsky 2005), and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word (Taylor 2017).
 The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units (LU) which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. LUs include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the LUs correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantics interface (Pustejovsky 1995).
 The study of lexical semantics looks at:

• The classification and decomposition of lexical items.
• The differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure cross-linguistically.
• The relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.

LEXICAL STRATIFICATION

1. (Morphophonology) Whereby morphology and phonology interact in a series of ordered levels or strata.
    For example, a proposal for English (Kiparsky 1982):
   • Stratum 1: 'i'-affixation: -ity, -ic; irregular inflection: cacti, oxen.
   • Stratum 2: '#'-affixation: -ness, -less; compounding.
   • Stratum 3: regular inflection.
    | Heinz J. Giegerich, 1999
2. (Morphophonology) The lexicon as a stratified module of the grammar.
   1. Stratum 1 comprises the morphology defined by Siegel (1974) as Class I (+-level affixation) as well as cyclic phonological rules, among the latter the rules of stress, Trisyllabic Shortening (nation – national), etc.
   2. On Stratum 2 are located the morphology involving (among other things) Siegel's Class-II (#-level) affixes as well as the remainder of the lexical phonological rules.
    To prevent bracket-sensitive phonological rules of stratum 2 from being triggered by brackets introduced on stratum 1, the Bracket Erasure Convention stipulates the deletion of all but the outermost brackets at the end of each stratum (Mohanan 1986). | Heinz J. Giegerich, 2004

LEXICAL SUBARRAY
(Syntax) Chomsky (1998) proposes to divide lexical arrays into lexical subarrays because of the grammaticality of sentences like (1)

1. There is a possibility that [_A a proof will be discovered ]

2. A possibility is that there will be discovered a proof

LEXICAL WORD
(Grammar; Semantics) Or, content word, lexical morpheme, substantive category, or, contentive. Contrast with function word and grammatical word. A word that conveys information in a text or speech act.
 In his book The Secret Life of Pronouns (2011), social psychologist James W. Pennebaker expands this definition: "Content words are words that have a culturally shared meaning in labeling an object or action. ... Content words are absolutely necessary to convey an idea to someone else."
 Content words—which include nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—belong to open classes of words: that is, classes of words to which new members are readily added. "The denotation of a content word," say Kortmann and Loebner, "is the category, or set, of all its potential referents" (Understanding Semantics, 2014). | Richard Nordquist, 2019

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