Complexité structurelle du lexique
The Structural Complexity of the Vocabulary

Summary/Abstract: The immense number of words in the lexis of a language appears at first sight as a huge alluvial mass, as a shapeless body devoid of any kind of internal structure. And yet, even at the level of the global system we can distinguish certain organizational landmarks: all the words follow a finite number of specific phonetic, morphematic and syntactic patterns, as described by traditional grammar books. If we approach the vocabulary from the perspective of more restricted thematic domains, this time without ignoring lexical semantics, then structuralist researches and methods have the merit of highlighting various levels of the systemic nature of the vocabulary, e.g. elements and units that abide by a structural kind of organization, mutual conditionings of its components, or the hierarchy of subjacent structures.

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