The vocabulary of a language can be called lexicon.
The concept of lexicon contains several meanings, all linked to the world of linguistics . Lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or a region , the dictionary of a language or the wealth of idioms and voices of an author .
Let's look at some example sentences below: "That is not the appropriate lexicon for a ten-year-old girl" , "A communication sciences professional must use a lexicon in accordance with their social responsibility" , "The lexicon of today's adolescents" It seems to be limited to a few words .
Lexical category
Grammar defines a lexical category or class as a well-defined group of words, which have the particularity of referring to certain concepts , whether abstract or material, and which have a meaning independent of their context. This type of words is usually classified according to its behavior at a morphological or syntactic level. Verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives belong to this class, which are considered subclassifications of it.
Unlike grammatical categories, it is an open group, since the possibility of future changes in its members is contemplated, as well as the incorporation of new components and exchanges between different languages, very common in the current era of communication. . When a society needs a new word to refer to a concept, a phenomenon, an object or an idea that has recently appeared in its culture, a new term is born that has semantic content and automatically enters the group of lexical categories of the language. to which it belongs.
The dictionary of a language can be called a lexicon.
The lexicon
The term lexicon is used to refer to the complete group of words that cover the different lexical categories of the same language. Taking into account all the languages on the planet, it can be stated that the verb and the noun represent the most widely used classes . However, it is important to note that each language conceives these types of words in a very particular way. For Japanese, for example, there is more than one type of adjective and, unlike Spanish or English, they can be conjugated; This means that the terms "cold", "blue" or "expensive" have an affirmative and a negative form, both with their respective variations for the past and present.
Continuing with the peculiarities of lexical categories in the thousands of languages spoken in the world, both Chinese, Korean and Japanese use nominal classifiers, a type of word that accompanies, for example, the counting of a noun, interposing between this and a number; While in Spanish we can say "three pencils" and "three sheets" just by putting the number before the noun , in Japanese it is necessary to use a different classifier (in this case, a counter) in each case, which highlights certain characteristics of each element. , as if we said "three conical-shaped objects pencils" and "three flat objects leaves."
Types of lexicon
There are various groups that can be formed from the lexicon. The lexicon that evolves within the same language is known as the heritage lexicon , while the loan lexicon is the one that includes foreign words .
The passive lexicon , on the other hand, is what is part of the speaker's understanding. The active lexicon , on the other hand, is used in everyday speech . Jargon is the lexicon that includes the vocabulary of a certain social group.
The discipline of linguistics that is responsible for analyzing the theoretical principles of the lexicon and its composition technique is known as lexicography . Its objective is to explain the lexical units of a language . There is also lexicology , another discipline in this same field, although its function is limited to systematically collecting these lexical units.