(workspace at oook.info/lexicon/lexgather.html)
My exploration of lexicon takes place within speech communities
that use words and phrases to convey meaning in discourse.
The method includes catching portentous words and phrases as they go by, explicating their sociocultural significance and exploring their speech community settings and implications.I identify four senses of 'lexicon':
It's important to remember that
And here's a dashboard of search and access portals
The lexicon is an abstract object, that is, a set of words with associated information,
stored in our mind and described in the dictionary...
The lexicon... is not organized alphabetically but rather
in word groupings whose members share similarities
from the point of view of their form and/or of their meaning...
A dictionary is an attempt to describe the lexicon...
...Lexicon and semantics intersect but do not coincide. (pp 1, 2, 5)
Samuel Johnson defines Lexicographer:
...A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge,
that busies himself in tracing the original,
and detailing the signification of words
(via the marvelous johnsonsdictionaryonline.com)
The signification... It's a grand challenge to compose/contrive glosses for items that enter the personal lexicon, and for those alive in public discourse of a speech community. Such exegetical texts might summarize historical emergence and sociocultural cross-linkage, but the real point is to capture the significance of the expression: what does it mean below the surface of its dictionary definition?
subsections to be elaborated and mapped:
- Keywords
- Neologisms
- Words that should exist
- Vernacular
- Translation: across the permeable membrane
- -nyms: acro-, backro-, -meta etc.
- Memes and Coinages
- Catchphrases
- Dialects and 'Other Englishes'
- Texting and Emojis: language in 'social media'
- Platitudes and Phatic Speech
Badmouthing and Vilification
- Fightin' Words
- Oaths and Intensifiers
- Calumny, denigration and disparagement
- Culture Wars
- You Can't Say That: taboos
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ AI Lexicons: a collection
Word Books on my shelves
OED Online trial 1995
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Rhetoric and Genre and Louche with a side of Filboid Studge
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧