Therefore, the activity level in the inferior frontal gyrus and the level of lexical ambiguity are directly proportional to each other, because of the increased retrieval demands associated with highly ambiguous content.

It has been speculated that because speech-associated gestures could possibly reduce lexical or sentential ambiguity, comprehension should improve in the presence of speech-associated gestures.

Compound words involving " locust " have also been used by anglophone translators as calques of archaic Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, or other language names for animals ; the resulting formations have, just as in the case of the Brownian grasshopper / cicada controversy, been, at times, a cause of lexical ambiguity and false polysemy in English.

One could also imagine rope was involved, at which point lexical ambiguity comes into play.

: The example hinges on the ambiguity of the lexical category of the word " raced ": It can be either a past-tense verb or a passive participle.

Emotional tone of voice, itself paralinguistic information, has been shown to affect the resolution of lexical ambiguity.

For instance, the word " bank " has several distinct lexical definitions, including " financial institution " and " edge of a river ".

According to this model, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix ( prefix, suffix, infix, etc .).

:* The acute accent " ́" above any vowel in Cyrillic alphabets is used in dictionaries, books for children and foreign learners to indicate the word stress, it also can be used for disambiguation of similarly spelled words with different lexical stresses.

Within lexical semantics, especially as applied to computers, modeling word meaning is easier when a given word is understood in terms of related words ; semantic networks are therefore important in computational linguistics.

When linguists study the lexicon, they consider such things as what constitutes a word ; the word-concept relationship ; lexical access and lexical access failure ; how a word's phonology, syntax, and meaning intersect ; the morphology-word relationship ; vocabulary structure within a given language ; language use ( that is, pragmatics ); language acquisition ; the history and evolution of words ( i. e. etymology ); and the relationships between words, often studied within philosophy of language.

* Semantics – study of the meaning of words ( lexical semantics ) and fixed word combinations ( phraseology ), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences

* The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents.

In B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour ( 1957 ), he suggested that the successful use of a sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces its " momentary " or contextual probability.

The word is derived from the Greek νοῦς ( nous " mind ") + σφαῖρα ( sphaira " sphere "), in lexical analogy to " atmosphere " and " biosphere ".

Commonly, the lexical root of the word is traced to (), which in Arabic means " purity ".

To coin a word to refer to a thing ( see lexical words ), the community must agree on a simple meaning ( a denotative meaning ) within their language.

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

In grammar, a part of speech ( also a word class, a lexical class, or a lexical category ) is a linguistic category of words ( or more precisely lexical items ), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question.

* grammatical differences in lexical items ( québécismes grammaticaux ), in which a word has different morpho-syntactic behavior in Quebec French than in other varieties ;

The doubled vowels indicate nasalization, and the final consonants indicate with which of the eight lexical tones the word is pronounced.

A rich variety of techniques have been researched, from dictionary-based methods that use the knowledge encoded in lexical resources, to supervised machine learning methods in which a classifier is trained for each distinct word on a corpus of manually sense-annotated examples, to completely unsupervised methods that cluster occurrences of words, thereby inducing word senses.

Japanese has five major lexical word classes:

Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase.

Among semantics of language, lexical semantics is most robust, and to some extend the phrase semantics too, while other types of linguistic semantics are new and not quite examined.

They are not strictly speaking pronouns because they do not substitute for a noun or noun phrase, and as such, some grammarians classify these terms in a separate lexical category called determiners ( they have a syntactic role close to that of adjectives, always qualifying a noun ).

In terms of phrase structure rules, phrasal categories can occur to the left of the arrow while lexical categories cannot, e. g. NP → D N. Traditionally, a phrasal category should consist of two or more words, although conventions vary in this area.

While this phrase may be used as one lexical item by English speakers, that is to say, an English speaker would not say only déjà to convey the meaning associated with the full term déjà vu, in the donor language ( French ), speakers would be aware of the phrase consisting of two words.

Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a " priming " word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related " target " word later.

A similar pattern has been claimed for English ( see above ): the traditional distinction between ( lexical ) primary and secondary stress is replaced partly by a prosodic rule stating that the final stressed syllable in a phrase is given additional stress.

( A word spoken alone becomes such a phrase, hence such prosodic stress may appear to be lexical if the pronunciation of words is analyzed in a standalone context rather than within phrases.

Other prominent theories include or have included dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorial grammar, relational grammar, link grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar.

In phrase structure grammars, such as generalised phrase structure grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar and lexical functional grammar, a feature structure is essentially a set of attribute-value pairs.

Focus was later suggested to be a structural position at the beginning of the sentence ( or on the left periphery ) in Romance languages such as Italian, as the lexical head of a Focus Phrase ( or FP, following the X-bar theory of phrase structure ).

Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word ( lexical stress ) and at the level of the phrase or sentence ( prosodic stress ).

To determine where the actual lexical stress is in a word, one may try pronouncing the word in a phrase, with other words before and after it and without any pauses between them, to eliminate the effects of tonic stress: in the còunterintèlligence commúnity, for example, one can hear secondary ( that is, lexical ) stress on two syllables of counterintelligence, as the primary ( tonic ) stress has shifted to community.

These names are most commonly used by linguists who work with non-transformational approaches like lexical functional grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, or dependency grammar.

The development of head-driven phrase structure grammar ( HPSG ) and lexical functional grammar ( LFG ) reflect these debates: these are both strongly lexicalist and representational systems.

* overtness of information, such as whether an argument of a verb is indicated by a lexical noun phrase, a pronoun, or not mentioned at all.

The triangulation method ( also called phrase table multiplication ) calculates the probability of both translation correspondences and lexical weight in s-p and p-t, to try to induce a new s-t phrase table.

The idea first came to prominence as part of generalized phrase structure grammar ; the ID / LP approach is also used in head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, and other unification grammars.