Lexical Item - Types of Lexical Items

Types of Lexical Items

Common types of lexical items/chunks include

  1. Words, e.g. cat, tree
  2. Parts of words, e.g. -s in trees, -er in worker, non- in nondescript, -est in loudest
  3. Phrasal verbs, e.g. put off or get out
  4. Polywords, e.g. by the way, inside out
  5. Collocations, e.g. motor vehicle, absolutely convinced.
  6. Institutionalized utterances, e.g. I'll get it, We'll see, That'll do, If I were you, Would you like a cup of coffee?
  7. Idioms, e.g. break a leg, was one whale of a, a bitter pill to swallow
  8. Sayings, e.g. The early bird gets the worm, The devil is in the details
  9. Sentence frames and heads, e.g. That is not as...as you think, The problem was
  10. Text frames, e.g., 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 that causes a cold, rather than to a virus that is cold.

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