A lexical rule is in a form of
syntactic
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
rule used within many theories of natural language syntax. These rules alter the argument structures of
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lexical ...
items (for example
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
s and
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ar ...
s) in order to alter their combinatory properties.
Lexical rules affect in particular specific
word class
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...
es and
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s. Moreover, they may have exceptions, do not apply across word boundaries and can only apply to
underlying form
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phono ...
s.
An example of a lexical rule in spoken English is the deletion of /n/. This rule applies in ''damn'' and ''autumn'', but not in ''hymnal''. Because the rule of n-deletion apparently needs information about the grammatical status of the word, it can only be lexical.
Lexical rules are the inverse of
postlexical rules.
References
Gussenhoven, C. & Jacobs, H. (1998). Understanding Phonology. Arnold, Londen.
Matthews, P. H. "lexical rule." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. : Oxford University Press, , 2014. Oxford Reference.
Syntactic relationships
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