polysemy same form with a related meaning, e.g. your foot, the foot of the mountain homonym same form with a different meaning e.g. cricket bat, vampire bat homophone same sound, different spelling and meaning lexical set a group of words which belong to the same category e.g. apple, banana, pineapple fixed expression a chunk of language whose constituent parts never change e.g. let's face it superordinate a word which is more generic than a given word or words. e.g. transport is the ... of train, bus, taxi etc. lexical field items which belong to one topic area. they may be different parts of speech e.g. cut, saucepan, flour are all part of the .... of cooking. Also called topic, or situation antonym a word with the opposite meaning to a given word collocation the way in which words are commonly used together lexical collocation e.g. rancid butter, breathe heavily false cognates or false friends words that look the same in two languages but have different meanings affixes prefixes and suffixes word family a group of words with the same root but different affixes eg love, lovely, unloved part of speech or word class what 'type of word' e.g. noun/adjective/verb etc grammatical collocation e.g. depend on, be interested in + verb + ing binomials up and down; salt and pepper etc trinomials lock, stock and barrel; Tom, Dick and Harry synonyms words that mean the same thing hyponyms examples of a particular superordinate e.g. winter, spring, summer sentence head the beginning part of a sentence used for organising discourse, e.g. The thing is,... lexicon the words that someone knows semantic field Group of words which are related in meaning receptive or passive vocabulary vocabulary that we understand but not use productive or active vocabulary vocabulary that we understand and can use connotation additional meaning of a word which shows people's attitude towards things register a speech variety usd by a particular group of people, usually sharing the same occupation. sometimes called jargon variety differences within a language due to geographical or social differences. e.g British English, American English style the type of language used in a particular genre or because of the level of formality of the discourse. words of Latin origin often tend to be more formalretrieval the ability to 'get' a word from your head. there is receptive or productive .... lexical density the ratio of content words to function words content words the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs in a sentence function words the 'grammatical' words in a sentence lexical variety refers to the amount (or lack of) substitution and repetition vague language language that reveals a sensitivity on the part of the speaker not to sound overly authoratative or superior e.g. it was some sort of electrical-type thing delexicalised verbs verbs which have no real independent meaning without their associated collocations e.g. get, do, make deictics relating to or characteristic of a word whose reference depends on the circumstances of its use OR, Linguistic elements that must be interpreted from the perspective of the speaker in order to be understood as the speaker intended. For example, (I/me, you), (this, that, these, those), (before, after, now and then), (here, there), (come, go) frequency the number of times a word occurs in the language range the number of different texts in which a word occurs availabilty how readily a word comes to mind lexis all the words in a language teachability how easy it is to teach an item of lexis learnability how easy it is to learn an item of lexis synophone a word that rhymes with another word, e.g. honey is a .... of money denotation the core, 'dictionary' meaning of a lexical item, with no layers of social or regional interpretation corpus a collection of real-life texts, either written or spoken, which can be analysed to investigate language use