Summary

Morphologyst, however have luxury of being more precise; we can define

word as sequence of one more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. In
doing so well begin to explore the nature of dictionaries, and importantly of our
native speaker knowledge of words, which we might term our mental lexican.
Dictionaries come all shapes and sizes, for all sorts of intended audience. Site and
audience are determined by individual publisher and indeed the finfished product
is shaped by all sort of market forces. And maker of dictionaries – lexicographers
are of course human. What gets into dictionaries has historically been subject to
the individual foibles of lexicographer not to mention the more of society. Futher,
sometimes we find item in dictionaries that we might hesitate to call word even if
they do occur in the dictionary. Among these items are word that are labeled as
nonce important, but nevertheless don’t seem to occu anywhere else. Every
language has ways of forming new word that so active and transparent that putting
all the words formed that way into dictionary would be a waste of space. For
example of English know that any word at all can have a present progrestive form
made with the suffix –ing.
The conclution that we are inexorably let to is thatwe can not really on
dictionaries to answer the question “is xyz a word?” on the one hand, dictionaries
don’t list all the word of nay language. They can’t list all derivatives with living
prefex and suffix or all technical , scientific , regional, or slang word. Those word
are encoded in what will call the mental lexicon, the sum total of word
knowledge that native speakercarry around in their heads.
The mental lexicon I mean the some total of everything an individual
speaker knows about the words of her language this knowledge includes
information about pronouncitation. Category (part of speech) and meaning , of
course but also information about syntax poperties. For example wheather verb is
teinsitive how many word or intransitive.
How many word, psycholinguist estimate, that the average English speaking know
10.000 words, and the average high school graduate 60.000 words.
Psycholinguistic have proposed a number of other strategies that both children
and adult seem to use in learning of word, one might be called the lexical contrast
principles .
Other ephasic display jargon aphasia there aphasia produce sentence using
function word, but have a trouble producing and under standing conten word.
Similar conclution follow front studies of two different genetic disorder specific
language impairmen (SLI) and william syndrome that effect language different
way.