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Unit 2 Lexis

This document defines and provides examples of key lexical concepts in language learning including context, affixes, prefixes, suffixes, compounds, base words, collocations, idioms, chunks, lexical sets, antonyms, synonyms, word families, homophones, homonyms, and follow-up activities matching examples to categories. It emphasizes that fully knowing a word involves understanding its various meanings and forms, and that vocabulary acquisition is a gradual process requiring repeated exposure and practice over time to support retention and use.

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Dilan Adithya
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98 views4 pages

Unit 2 Lexis

This document defines and provides examples of key lexical concepts in language learning including context, affixes, prefixes, suffixes, compounds, base words, collocations, idioms, chunks, lexical sets, antonyms, synonyms, word families, homophones, homonyms, and follow-up activities matching examples to categories. It emphasizes that fully knowing a word involves understanding its various meanings and forms, and that vocabulary acquisition is a gradual process requiring repeated exposure and practice over time to support retention and use.

Uploaded by

Dilan Adithya
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Unit – 2 Lexis

Lexis is individual words or sets of words. Vocabulary items that have specific
meaning, For example: tree, get up, first of all.

Lexical terms

Context
The situation in which language is used or presented, e.g. a story about a holiday experience
could be used as the context to present and practice past tenses. Photographs can help to
provide a context for a magazine article.
The words or phrases before or after a word in discourse which help someone to understand
that word. See deduce meaning from context.

Affix (verb), affixation (noun)


A meaningful group of letters added to the beginning or end of a word to make a new word,
which can be a different part of speech from the original word, e.g. interview, interviewer.
Affix is the process of adding a prefix or suffix to a word.

Prefix
A prefix is a letter or group of letters added to the beginning of a word to make a new word, e.g.
clear - unclear.

Suffix
A suffix is a letter or group of letters added at the end of a word to make a new word, e.g.
good - goodness.

Compound
Nouns, verbs, adjectives or prepositions that are made up of two or more words and have
one unit of meaning, e.g. assistant office manager, long-legged.

Compound nouns
Compound noun is a combination of two or more words, which are used as a single word, e.g.
a flower shop, a headache, tooth paste

Base words
The core word or part of a word from which other words can be made by adding a prefix
or suffix, e.g. photograph is the root or baseword word of photographer and photographic.

Collocations
Words which are regularly used together. The relation between the words may be grammatical,
for example when certain verbs/adjectives collocate with particular prepositions,
e.g. depend on, good at or when a verb like make or do collocation with a noun, e.g. do
the shopping, make a plan. collocation may also be lexical when two content words
are regularly used together, e.g. We went the wrong way NOT We went the incorrect way.
Idiom (noun), idiomatic (adjective)
A group of words that are used together, in which the meaning of the whole word group is
different from the meaning of each individual word, e.g. She felt under the weather means
that she felt ill.

Chunks
Any pair or group of words commonly found together or near one another, e.g. phrasal
verbs, idioms, collocations, fixed expressions.

Lexical set

Groups of words that belong to the same topic area.

Family, furniture, food

apple, orange, Banana , mango - fruit

Antonyms

Words with the opposite meaning

Eg : - narrow – wide

Synonyms

Words with the same or similar meaning.

Eg:- beautiful – pretty

Word families

Words come from the affixations from the same base word.

Real, really, realistic, unreal

Homophones

Words with the same pronunciation but different letters and meaning.

made – maid

Homonyms

Homonyms are words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different
meanings.

Address - My address is 7B, Aiden road, Manchester

The principal addressed at the assembly.


Follow up activity

What does each of these sets of words have in common ? Are they synonyms, antonyms, lexical
sets, compounds, collocations, words with prefixes or words with suffixes.

A. Table, chair , sofa, bed, bookcase, chest of drawers, desk


B. Old – young, bright – dark , loud – quiet , fast – slow, first – last, long – short
C. A straight road, a brilliant idea, hard work, no problem, extremely grateful
D. Neat – tidy , precisely – exactly, to doubt – to question, nobody – no one
E. microwave , compact disc, toothbrush, paper clip, lampshade, bottle top
F. illness, badly, useless, doubtful, affordable, ability, practical
G. imperfect, rewrite, unable, illiterate, incorrect, ultramodern

Practice task
For questions 1-5, match the examples of vocabulary with the categories listed A-
F There is one extra option you do not need to use.
Examples of vocabulary Categories
1. impossible , unhappy, disadvantage, rename A. synonyms
2. Hard work, a heavy subject, a great idea B. collocations
3. wonderful, marvelous, brilliant, great C. compound words
4. longest, director, wooden, slowly D. Lexical set
5. oranges, apples, mangoes, bananas E words with suffixes
Words with prefixes
Key concepts
 
 Really knowing a word means knowing all its different kinds of meaning.

 is it,
knowing a word also involves understanding its form ( what part of speech
 how it works with grammatically, and how it is pronounced and spelt)


Whether we are learning our first or our second language, it takes a long time
 before we fully know a word, We often recognize a word before we use it.

Teachers need to introduce vocabulary items again and again to learners,
expanding gradually on their meaning and their forms. This also increase the
 chances of learners remembering the item.


Teachers can introduce vocabulary items in reading and listening before we ask
learners to use the items.

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