Suggested Answers for Check Questions

Given a string of sounds associated with a particular meaning (‘roughly’ a word), its pronunciation, meaning, combinatorial properties (syntactic properties) are not predictable from its form (arbitrariness). A part of linguistic knowledge is lexical knowledge which is knowledge about words, their pronunciation, meaning, syntactic properties. These types of information are stored in what is called ‘the (mental) lexicon’, a ‘dictionary’ of the words a speaker knows. The words stored / contained in the lexicon are grouped according to certain general properties they share – based on these groups a certain limited number of categories may be established.