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PE2379 ch04.qxd 24/1/02 16:05 Page 305<br />

lexicon n<br />

see also LEXICAL ENTRY<br />

lexical corpus n<br />

a collection <strong>of</strong> words for purposes <strong>of</strong> language analysis. Many lexical corpora<br />

contain millions <strong>of</strong> words that can be analyzed by a computer.<br />

see also CORPUS<br />

lexical decision task n<br />

see PRIMING<br />

lexical field<br />

lexical density n<br />

also Type-Token Ratio, concept load<br />

a measure <strong>of</strong> the ratio <strong>of</strong> different words to the total number <strong>of</strong> words in<br />

a text, sometimes used as a measure <strong>of</strong> the difficulty <strong>of</strong> a passage or text.<br />

Lexical density is normally expressed as a percentage and is calculated by<br />

the formula:<br />

number <strong>of</strong> separate words<br />

Lexical density<br />

100<br />

total number <strong>of</strong> words in the text<br />

For example, the lexical density <strong>of</strong> this definition is:<br />

29 separate words<br />

100 50.88<br />

57 total words<br />

see also TYPE<br />

lexical entry n<br />

a term used in TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR for a word or<br />

phrase listed in the lexicon (see LEXICON 3 ) <strong>of</strong> the grammar.<br />

The information given in a lexical entry usually includes:<br />

a its pronunciation (see DISTINCTIVE FEATURE)<br />

b its meaning, which may be given in a formalized way, e.g. (+human)<br />

(+male) (see SEMANTIC FEATURES)<br />

c its LEXICAL CATEGORY, e.g. n(oun), v(erb), a(djective)<br />

d other linguistic items it may co-occur with in a sentence, e.g. whether<br />

or not a verb can be followed by an object (see OBJECT 1 )<br />

In later models <strong>of</strong> TG Grammar, a lexical entry would also contain<br />

semantic roles such as agent, patient and goal which can be assigned to<br />

noun phrases in the sentence (see q-THEORY).<br />

see also PROJECTION PRINCIPLE<br />

lexical field n<br />

also semantic field<br />

the organization <strong>of</strong> related words and expressions (see LEXEME) into a<br />

305

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