lexicology

Lexicology is  the study of the vocabulary of a language. For example :

v  Eat

It means to put food into the mouth

v  Home

It means the place where one lives

There is therefore the difference between the grammatical word (the morpheme) and the lexical word (the lexeme). In the example “foot” There is grammatical word or morpheme “foot” which has its grammatical funfiction as a noun (naming an object), while the lexical word or lexeme “foot” refers to the part of the body at the bottom of the leg on which we stand.

Lexical Decomposition

            Lexical decomposition is a means of characterizing the detail lexical features of a word. For example:

Man:+human, +adult, +male

Women: +human, +adult, -male

Boy: +human, -adult, +male

Girl: +human, -adult, -male

Thus we can tabulate such decomposition as:

	Man	Women	Boy	Girl
Human	+	+	+	+
Adult	+	+	-	-
Male	+	-	+	-

Collocation

            One final aspect of our knowledge of words has nothing to do with any of the factors considered so far. We know which words tend to occur with other words. If you ask a thousand people what they think of when you say hammer, more than half will say nail. If you say table ,they’ll mostly say chair, and butter elicits bread, needle elicits thread and saltelicits pepper. One way we seem to organize our knowledge of words is simply on the basis of collocation, or frequently occurring together.