This chapter focuses on the lexicon. It discusses how languages encode concepts into words and introduces lexical and grammatical word categories attested in languages, paying special attention to content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and interjections). This chapter also highlights strategies that can be used to increase the number of words in a conlang, provides a set of guided questions to expand a conlang vocabulary and discusses aspects of the lexicon of the Salt language, including color terms. The chapter ends with a list of resources ad references to explore further.

Like segmental inventories, phonotactic patterns show comparatively little variation across Australia. Following Steriade, a number of analysts have proposed that consonantal transitions play a central role in constraining phonotactic patterns. They have particularly noted that VC transitions appear to play a significant role, as well as the more familiar role of CV transitions. A preference for having VC transitions appears to be an important factor in two areas: (i) place assimilation patterns; (ii) coronal place neutralization patterns. Despite the fact that nasals and obstruents share the same set of place oppositions, Australian languages do not show the standard assimilatory pattern whereby a nasal assimilates in place of articulation to a following obstruent. Rather, Australian languages show two non-standard patterns. There may be no assimilation, or the obstruent assimilates in place of articulation to the preceding nasal. Both these non-standard patterns appear to relate to a preference for maintaining VC transitions into the nasals. The only detailed proposals for VC syllables come from Australian languages, and we discuss the evidence for these proposals in detail. Licensing by cue, optimising allomorphy, positional markedness, gesture and timing, loanword, and contact phonology are also discussed.

We begin with some longstanding observations about the unusual character of sound change in Australia: first, that there is often a lack of evidence for sound change between related languages; second and relatedly, that sound change is characteristically structure-preserving in Australia: it does not result in changes to the inventory or the phonotactics. This characteristic appears to be behind both the apparent lack of sound change and the widespread homogeneity of inventories and phonotactics discussed in earlier chapters. We discuss one very widespread pattern of sound change – lenition – with respect to the kinds of segments and word positions involved, and the evident failure of these changes to spread through the lexicon in a standard Neogrammarian fashion. Rather, many sound changes appear to have the character of ‘lexical diffusion’. We also discuss the set of changes known as ‘initial dropping’, which affected languages in Cape York, Central Australia, and elsewhere, where radical sound changes did take place, leaving these languages with inventories and phonotactics that are quite different from those found elsewhere on the continent or indeed in the world. Such languages raise questions about the relationship between models of speech processing and language change.

In this chapter, I will provide a brief outline of the structure of the mental grammar, referring for a more extensive treatment to ML, Chapter 6. This chapter then offers a conversation about what Noam Chomsky considers to be the most central linguistic argument for his Innateness Hypothesis (IH), the poverty of the stimulus argument. We then discuss some different ways in which the mental grammar could be organized. Finally, I will raise questions about what kinds of evidence could falsify the IH and whether such evidence can actually be found. In this connection, we will also ask how rich the alleged innate system needs to be.

The Old English poem Beowulf is a particularly valuable source of information about early features of the English language. In its present form the poem is recorded in a manuscript of unknown provenance made, in all probability, shortly after the millennium. Yet it evinces linguistic features that are highly conservative, suggesting that the extant text was copied, perhaps directly, from a much older exemplar, and that the poem was composed in a more northerly dialect than the Late West Saxon one in which it is preserved. Some of the poem’s conservative linguistic features are detectable only on the basis of poetic meter. Other of the poem’s archaic features include some that are orthographic in nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and metrical. Beowulf is not the only linguistically conservative poem preserved in Old English, but in many ways it reveals, more than any other poem, a great deal about what the language was like at a much earlier time than that at which all but a minuscule portion of the total extant corpus of Old English was recorded. It is thus an invaluable window on the prehistory of the English language.

The chapter considers the nature of lexical borrowing and the challenges of identifying the contribution that it has made to the lexicon of English. It looks at the major sources of data, especially historical dictionaries. It considers the importance of identifying by whom a word is used, and in which contexts. It also examines phenomena of discontinuity and multiple inputs in the histories of words, and the challenges that these present for constructing linear histories of English words, and larger-scale narratives of the history of the lexicon.

Dictionaries of Nahuatl, the largest indigenous language in North America, have been produced since the mid sixteenth century. The first were written to facilitate Catholic missionary activities, and Evangelicals continue this production today. Works containing lexical documentation for scientific purposes began to appear in the nineteenth century. Across time, Nahuatl dictionaries have proceeded from manuscripts, through the various stages of printing, to modern, searchable databases. Traditionally, the two most influential works have been Alonso de Molina’s Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana (1555–71) and Frances Karttunen’s An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (1983); however, students and researchers today tend to consult Stephanie Wood’s Online Nahuatl Dictionary (https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org) and the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl (www.gdn.unam.mx). With one exception, the grammatical information and definitions contained in all Nahuatl dictionaries have been in languages other than Nahuatl; in other words, they have not been written for the purpose of helping Indigenous people to engage in critical and creative thinking within their own language and culture.

This chapter examines how morphology has been implicated in studies of comparative syntax. A major theme is how different theories define morphology and how such definitions relate to research in morphological theory. I first look at what it might mean to reduce syntactic variation to morphology or the lexicon. While some well-known approaches have relatively little to do with morphology as understood in morphological theory, one of them provides a plausible way of encoding variation in the features of syntactic terminals. I then ask what Distributed Morphology adds to the study of universals and variation, focusing on the PF interface and showing that there are possible universals in this part of the grammar, but they must be sought at an appropriate level of abstraction. Finally, I examine a conception of PF that arises in some Minimalist discussions where it is posited that apparent syntactic variation is driven by the need to have syntactic structures connect with language-external systems. If correct, this would mean much of what has been analyzed as part of the syntax is actually part of the PF component. However, how this can be investigated empirically is an open topic.

This chapter works backward from the glossary of terms in Joseph Moxon’s 1683 printer’s manual and a 1684 poem that uses those terms extensively to show how the less technical, more widespread set of terms collected in this book demonstrate considerable rhetorical and conceptual flexibility. Two key terms, “bookish” and “set forth,” begin an exploration of how the language of books gave people a way to describe their culture and situate themselves within it.

Teacher education programs, practitioners, and scholars committed to school–university partnership (SUP) and professional development school (PDS) structures have long relied on potentially confounding titles, sets of principles, lexicons, and concepts to guide their work. In this chapter, the authors consider eight of the key terms associated with PDSs and SUPs, drawn from an analysis of the language used in the constitutional documents of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), the Association of Teacher Education (ATE), and other organizations. The authors examine the meanings of these appellations and identify metaphors they propose practitioners are “partnering by,” and suggest alternative metaphors that might be more accurate guides for future SUP/PDS work. The authors contend that the SUP/PDS teacher education field might rethink both the language and the metaphors in which partnership practices are grounded to facilitate progress toward the effective implementation of these structures.

Acquisition of vocabulary in Irish is of interest for many reasons. For example, Irish has a verb–subject–object word order, placing verbs in a more salient sentence position compared to nouns, and lexical verbs are repeated/negated in response to a yes/no question. Lexical items in Irish carry rich inflectional information, the acquisition of which may slow down the overall acquisition of words. Furthermore, Irish vocabulary is acquired in a context of universal bilingualism, so can inform us about bilingual language acquisition in a minority language context. The chapter will review how children acquire comprehension and expression of Irish vocabulary categories compared to other languages, and how Irish vocabulary develops in line with that of English. Using data from longitudinal and cross-sectional research collected through parent diaries, corpus data, parent report, and direct testing, the chapter reviews the internal and external factors that influence overall vocabulary attainment as well as the changes in Irish vocabulary knowledge that have been observed across the generations. Finally, future directions for research that have emerged from these studies will be explored.

This chapter provides a review of the acquisition of the Welsh lexicon. Because Welsh-speaking children are growing up as both Welsh and English speakers, consideration of the acquisition of Welsh in relation to English allows a comprehensive picture of development. The chapter first explores what an examination of the number of lexical items a child knows in the two languages reveals, and this is followed by an examination of other factors central to lexical knowledge. These include children’s acquisition of the collection/unitiser system in Welsh, the acquisition of mutation and its ramifications for the acquisition of grammatical gender, and bilinguals’ processing of semantics in their two languages when these carve up the semantic space differently. Discussion includes ramifications for practitioners.

This chapter presents on overview of present-day Welsh English(es) with a focus on regional variation and diachronic developments over the past fifty years. The Anglicisation of Wales has progressed in several phases over the centuries, which is why the accents and dialects of English in Wales are regionally distinctive, the Welsh language and neighbouring English English dialects impacting them to different degrees. The chapter takes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects (Parry 1999) as a starting point and uses corpus and survey data compiled in the twenty-first century as well as recent research publications, thereby examining the main trends of development in the different domains of English. Phonological variation and change are described across a broad North–South continuum, whereas in morphosyntax the greatest differences can be found between the predominantly English-speaking Southeast and the bilingual, historically Welsh-dominant North and West Wales. In regional lexicon, sociolinguistically and nationally salient items are relatively few, originating from both Welsh and English. Finally, the chapter draws attention to recent research, and highlights some caveats and future directions for the study of English in Wales.

In diachronic development and contemporary structure of Slavic lexicons, we see influences of universal semantic mechanisms and specific historical processes, of language development, and of language contact. Old Church Slavonic played a role in forming Slavic vocabulary, especially in Russian, where specific or colloquial synonyms contrast with abstract or formal (golova ‘head as body part’ vs. glava ‘head as top in a hierarchy’). Semantic divergence of Proto-Slavic roots creates inter-lingual enantiosemy (e.g., Rus. čerstvyj ‘stale’ vs. Cze. čerstvý ‘fresh’). To compare languages we use regular abstract semantic relations, e.g. synonymy, antonymy, or lexical functions Magn, Oper. Linguistic expressions may differ, but we find similar semantic oppositions and derivation mechanisms. The languages share the same types of antonymy, albeit using different prefixes. Semantic bleaching patterns also agree: adjectives meaning ‘scary’ develop to mean ‘high degree’. Motion verbs such as ‘go’ come to mean process or result. We give case studies of lexical relations: Polish synonyms honor vs. cześć, Russian pravda vs. istina.

Chapter 14 discusses what it means to “know” a word and how learners can grow their vocabulary while learning a new language. Incidental and intentional vocabulary learning are defined as authors make connections to the ways in which teachers can support their classes. In addition, individual differences that have been found to impact vocabulary learning are presented, along with comprehension strategies for readers to try out.