Course Title: Lexicon: The Vocabulary of Language
Course Description: This course delves into the intricate world of lexicons, exploring how words and their meanings are organized, acquired, and used in language. Students will learn about lexical semantics, morphology, syntax, and the role of lexicons in various linguistic theories and applications.
Course Outline:
- Week 1: Introduction to Lexicon
- Definition of lexicon and its role in language
- Lexical units: words, morphemes, and lexemes
- Historical perspectives on lexicon studies
- Week 2: Lexical Semantics
- Basic concepts in lexical semantics (polysemy, homonymy, synonymy)
- Semantic relations (hyponymy, meronymy, antonymy)
- Semantic fields and lexical networks
- Week 3: Lexical Acquisition
- Theories of lexical acquisition (nativist, empiricist, constructivist)
- Lexical development in infants and children
- Lexical processing in adults: word recognition and access
- Week 4: Morphological Analysis
- Morphological structure of words (roots, affixes, derivational and inflectional morphology)
- Lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and their morphological properties
- Morphological typology and cross-linguistic variation
- Week 5: Lexical Variation and Change
- Diachronic changes in lexicon (borrowing, semantic shift, word formation)
- Sociolinguistic factors influencing lexical variation (dialects, registers, jargon)
- Lexical borrowing and loanword adaptation
- Week 6: Lexicalization and Idiomatic Expressions
- Process of lexicalization: from concepts to lexical items
- Idioms and idiomatic expressions in language
- Analysis of idiomatic meaning and compositionality
- Week 7: Lexicon and Syntax
- Lexical selection and syntactic structures
- Lexical categories and syntactic distribution
- Lexical semantics in sentence interpretation
- Week 8: Lexicon in Computational Linguistics
- Lexical resources in NLP (dictionaries, lexicons, ontologies)
- Lexical disambiguation and sense tagging
- Lexical databases and their applications
- Week 9: Lexicon and Lexicography
- Principles of lexicography (definition, description, usage)
- Lexicographic tools and techniques
- Lexicographic challenges in multilingual and specialized domains
- Week 10: Lexicon and Cognitive Linguistics
- Cognitive approaches to lexicon (prototype theory, image schemas)
- Lexical representation and mental lexicon
- Embodied cognition and lexical semantics
Course Assignments:
- Weekly readings and discussions on assigned topics
- Lexical semantics analyses of words and semantic relations
- Morphological analysis exercises and derivational studies
- Lexical variation and change case studies
- Lexicographic project: compiling a mini-dictionary or glossary
- Final project: Lexical analysis of a corpus or text dataset
Course Materials:
- Textbook: “Lexical Semantics” by D. A. Cruse
- Research articles and books on lexicon and lexical studies
- Lexicographic resources (dictionaries, corpora, linguistic databases)
- Computational linguistics tools and software
- Cognitive linguistics resources and theories
Assessment:
- Participation in class discussions and activities
- Quizzes and exams covering lexicon concepts and theories
- Lexical analysis assignments and projects
- Lexicographic project evaluation
- Final project presentation and report
Prerequisites: No specific prerequisites are required, but a basic understanding of linguistics and language structure would be beneficial. Openness to exploring lexical diversity across languages and contexts is encouraged.