PART II: THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LEXICON

 

The term lexicon is derived from Greek lexicon (The Living Webster, 1977, p. 549), and it means the vocabulary of a language, specifically in a dictionary form. The terms vocabulary and lexicon are treated as synonyms in this book. The structure of the English lexicon may be studied in a variety of ways. For example, we can study classes of words (parts of speech), the meanings of words (semantics) and their associative fields, and semantic or lexical fields. We may apply diachronic and synchronic approaches to the structure of the English vocabulary.