ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—The lexicon is an important object of study, not only in linguistics but also in the philosophy of language, cognitive psychology (→ LANGUAGE), anthropology, and the communication sciences (→COMMUNICATION). The common ground in these disciplines is that they all treat words as signs and examine the relationships between them (→SIGN). Although acknowledged as important, the lexicon is nonetheless a vague concept, even for linguists. It ranges from being a set of partially regular forms to a set of representations of content structured by ill-defined laws that differ across authors (→REPRESENTATION).
