Talk:lexical item

RFV discussion: December 2022–February 2023

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lexical item

"A term—word or a sequence of words—that acts as a unit of meaning, including words, phrases, phrasal verbs and proverbs, exemplified by cat, traffic light, take care of, by-the-way, and don't count your chickens before they hatch. "

I hate to say this but I created this based on WP years ago, and I did not check authoritative sources. My mistake. Who uses this term, and in what sense? (Wiktionary could use label "deprecated" like Wikidata does; that would be fun.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:34, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

cited Kiwima (talk) 23:56, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

From these quotations, I only see that the term is used, but not what it means. Importantly, does it mean a) something like word (syntactic form), or b) something like a pairing of a word with one of its senses? If the latter, there would be as many lexical items in a lexical database as there are definition lines. To see which is the case, a lot of context is required, or explicit definition. That is one thing that is unclear. Another thing unclear is whether the term covers all the items listed in the definition; the quotations do not tell us that at all, from what I can see. (Incidentally, I am not sure Wiktionary is the best tool to do this kind of investigation; Wikidata may be better for that. But let us see.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:50, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Which sense of item is it? The closest would appear to be "distinct physical object", but words are not physical; or "a line of text (etc.)", but it needn't be a whole line. Equinox ◑ 21:52, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

My understanding is that it's the sense of an item in a list, i.e. a member of a set, though I think we're missing a sense at item since I can't see one for that (3-5 could be considered subsenses). The OED sense 2a has the much broader "An article or unit of any kind included in an enumeration ... an entry or thing entered in an account or register, a clause of a document" and so forth, which would fit.

"Unit included in an enumeration" is amusingly technical but covers the sense exactly. Score one to the OED. Equinox ◑ 04:08, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Various passages I can find also suggest this reading of "lexical item": "A lexical item is an item taken out of the lexicon" [1], "A lexical item ... is an item which you would expect to find having its own entry in the dictionary" [2], and this page where "an item from the lexicon" is used as a synonym of "lexical item". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:07, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much. This is the kind of matter I was looking for. Frankly, the more I think about it, the more I find the Wiktionary attestation business problematic. It has its uses and utility, but the idea that one could do serious meaning clarification by providing 3 quotations of use is just preposterous. Wikidata is an excellent too for this work, tracing structured defining claims to authoritative sources. If you can find more sources of authoritative definitions, that would be excellent, but what you found is very useful.

I am not sure whether to call it cited; I may use Wikidata (Wiki-concept-clarification-tool-via-structured-defining-claims) in the combination with your sources to enter structured defining claims for "lexical item".

Some questions:

• "lexical item is an item taken out of the lexicon", "an item from the lexicon":
  • In what sense of "lexicon"?
  • What is the superclass? Is it word or phrase being defined, is it a definition line of one of the words (a word or phrase stating the meaning), is it a pairing of a word or phrase (or other similar syntactic object) with one of the senses, which would be FrameNet's "lexical unit"?
• "item which you would expect to find having its own entry in the dictionary"
  • That does sound like referring to a word or phase. That seems most convincingly match what we have now. But ideally, 3 sources supporting that would be good.

Further supporting material would include sources explicitly stating any of the following:

• proverbs are lexical items
• letters are lexical items
• proverb so and so is a lexical item

And similar.

Activities involved in concept clarification, tracing to sources making these claims:

• What is the primary superclass?
• What are other superclasses?
• What are example subclasses?
• What are example instances?
• What classess is this to be distinguished from?

--Dan Polansky (talk) 08:16, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Dan, these are great questions but there's no room on this already huge page. Why don't we move it to the Talk page of the entry, and link it from here?| Equinox ◑ 10:05, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Fair point. Let me just say again that I don't think the current def has been conclusively substantiated; the attesting quotations are nearly worthless. --12:54, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

RFV Passed, Dan has been banned. Ioaxxere (talk) 03:20, 10 February 2023 (UTC)