Linguistics lexicon handout
it doesn't take much thought to realise that any language spoken in a given physical and
cultural environment is likely to have efficient ways of referring to distinctions that are
important in that environment. That doesn't mean that you can read very much into
individual words and individual facts about the lexicon of a given language (this topic has
already come up in connection with debates about the location of the Indo-European
homeland), but as a generalisation about lexicons, it's certainly valid.
Systematic consideration of the lexicon is often left out of language descriptions and doesn't
play much of a role in linguistic theory, in part because the lexicon is (or is often thought of
as) the repository of everything that is arbitrary and unsystematic about language. Looked at
one way, this exclusion makes sense: whether a language has a word for `horse' or not tells us
nothing about the language's grammar or phonology. However, the fact that the lexicon
annaabi.ee 
