Talk:Lexical item

Lexical unit
I don't know about lexical items, but a lexical unit is mostly understood as a composition of all forms + one meaning variant of a given word, e.g. the word forms bank + banks + its meaning "monetary institution" (see the definition here). I don't think that this is clear from the article. – Tuetschek (talk) 14:26, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

A number of things
A) I've changed punctuation and italics to conform with Wiki style. Not "e.g." but "e.g.,". Also, ellipses were not used consistently.

B) Any one of these words would illustrate the point: "fact/suggestion/problem/danger". Combining several words with slashes is confusing, and contrary to Wiki and other style manuals. This is redolent of linguistic notation, but it doesn't belong in a general article.

C) Copyedit was done. For example, "sets of words organized into groups" seems to mean just "groups of words". It's not clear how a "set" is involved. Drawing a distinction between words, units and "chunks" assumes the reader can draw some special meaning from each of them. However, omitting two of the three concepts doesn't create an untrue statement, so it's not clear why they are there.

D) "Polyword" is used, however, this is a very uncommon word that needs explanation.

E) Key to being an idiom is that the overall meaning cannot be determined from the individual words. Reading several examples from the Idiom Wikipedia page, I find that some phrases that have been repeated here have a meaning that is perfectly clear to me. Three are quoted whose etymology and meaning I happen to know at the word level. (Anybody in theater understands what "break a leg" means. It means (humorously) "I hope you break your leg while you are on stage.) A better example, in my opinion, is the one in the article "fit as a fiddle".

F) This statement "The correct semantic relation here is that of causality (the virus causing the cold) as opposed to quality (the virus having the property of being cold)." is largely a repetition of the previous statement, in academic language.

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (talk) 06:21, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Nice cleanup. Except that "break a leg" really means "Don't freeze up or panic or forget your lines -- breaking a leg, or almost any misfortune at all, would be preferable to forgetting one's lines while on stage. At least if you broke your leg, you'd have a valid excuse for a bad performance." User:Linas  04:20, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

A single character
Is a single textual character such as "?" a lexical item? NoToleranceForIntolerance (talk) 03:36, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

parsing
In the first diagram, BEAT + UP are actually on separate stems, since UP (and indeed all particles) has its own function. This means that "phrasal verb" is fiction. Plus, what follows BEAT + UP is actually a zero-prepositional phrase. You either have a particle that modifies the verb (to some extent, where UP means 'completely') or then a preposition, the latter being always belonging to what follows the verb (forming a prepositional phrase). Stjohn1970 (talk) 18:36, 10 April 2024 (UTC)