vocabulary vs lexis
word vs lexical item
Some teachers, trainers and authors use the terms vocabulary and lexis interchangeably (c.f. Thornbury (1997:43);
‘Vocabulary’ vs. ‘lexis’ is also partly a matter of register - ‘lexis’ is more likely to be used by linguists than by the non-specialists.
‘Word’ vs. ‘lexical item’: words consist of one word, whereas lexical items can consist of more than one.
What is a corpus?
A large, structured collection of spoken or written texts stored electronically and used for linguistic analysis, such as studying how words and grammar are used in real contexts.
What is pre-fabricated language?
Chunks or sequences of words that are stored and used as whole units rather than being newly constructed each time, often to increase fluency (e.g. How are you?, I don’t know, at the end of the day).
What is colligation?
Colligation is the way one word or pattern co-occurs with a (particular) grammar pattern
e.g.
verb of motion + directional particle - run away, hurry back
What is lexical priming?
Lexical Priming (Michael Hoey)
A theory suggesting that each time we encounter a word, we subconsciously learn its typical collocations, grammatical patterns, and contexts, so that future uses of the word are “primed” by our previous experiences with it.
The word “commit” is often primed to occur with certain nouns, such as crime, offence.
What is a concordancer?
A software tool that searches a corpus and displays how a particular word or phrase is used in multiple real examples, usually showing it in the centre of each line of text (called key word in context, or KWIC).
hyponym vs superordinate vs lexical set
Hyponym: A word that represents a specific example within a broader category (e.g. apple is a hyponym of fruit).
Superordinate (or hypernym): A more general term that covers a group of related items (e.g. fruit is the superordinate of apple, banana, orange).
Lexical set: A group of words that share the same superordinate (e.g. apple, banana, orange, pear belong to the lexical set of fruit).
Denotation vs Connotation
The literal, dictionary meaning of a word.
👉 Example: Home = a place where someone lives.
Connotation: The emotional or cultural associations a word carries beyond its literal meaning.
👉 Example: Home = warmth, family, comfort, safety.
What is compounding?
A word-formation process in which two or more free morphemes (usually words) are combined to create a new word with its own meaning (e.g. ice cream, toothbrush).
What is reduplication?
word-formation process where all or part of a word is repeated to create a new word or to change meaning or grammatical function (e.g. bye-bye, zig-zag, chit-chat).
What is assonance?
The repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds within nearby words, often used for effect in poetry or speech (e.g. hear the mellow wedding bells).
What is alliteration?
The repetition of the same initial consonant sound in two or more nearby words, often used for emphasis or effect (e.g. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers).
What is an acronym?
A type of word formation where the initial letters of a series of words are combined and pronounced as a single word (e.g. NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
What are initialisms?
A type of abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a series of words, where each letter is pronounced separately (e.g. BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation, USA = United States of America).
What is blending?
A word-formation process where parts of two or more words are combined to create a new word with elements of both meanings (e.g. brunch = breakfast + lunch, smog = smoke + fog).
What is realia?
Real objects or materials from everyday life used in the classroom to help learners understand and use language in a meaningful, authentic context (e.g. using a train ticket or a menu in a lesson).
What is a substitution drill?
controlled practice activity in which learners repeat a model sentence and replace one element with another word or phrase, often to practise structure or vocabulary (e.g. This is a pen. → This is a book.).
What are antonyms?
Words that have opposite meanings (e.g. hot ↔ cold, begin ↔ end).
