Editing Lexicon (section)

== Size and organization ==

Items in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic elements but contain both phonological and morphological components. When describing the lexicon, a reductionist approach is used, trying to remain general while using a minimal description. To describe the size of a lexicon, [[lexeme]]s are grouped into lemmas. A [[Lemma (morphology)|lemma]] is a group of lexemes generated by [[Inflection#Inflectional morphology|inflectional morphology]]. Lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords that list the [[citation form]]s and any [[English irregular verbs|irregular forms]], since these must be learned to use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas. The lexicon is also organized according to open and closed categories. [[Part of speech|Closed categories]], such as [[Determiner (linguistics)|determiners]] or [[pronoun]]s, are rarely given new lexemes; their function is primarily [[Syntax|syntactic]]. Open categories, such as [[noun]]s and [[verb]]s, have highly active generation mechanisms and their lexemes are more [[Semantics|semantic]] in nature.