Meaning of mislexicalize | Babel Free

Definitions

To lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.

Examples

“The question⟳ was raised whether or not P had also mislexicalized the name⟳ of the nonsense object, and on the following visit⟳ to his home, he was asked to look⟳ for the laǒshủ from among a group of toys on the floor and bring⟳ it over to me.”

“Evidence such as this argues strongly against the hypothesis that children at this age mislexicalize determiner universal quantifiers as belonging to the same surface form⟳ syntactic category as adverbs (Roeper and de Villiers 1991), since adverbs in English cannot occur⟳ between a verb and a direct⟳ object NP.”

“For example , this fact is problematic for the hypothesis, suggested to me at one point⟳ by Ken Drozd, that the child may have⟳ simply mislexicalized the universal quantifier as denoting a biconditional rather than a condition”

“More generally: If a sentence S1 lexically presumes a sentence S2 and S2 is false, then S1 will be heard as deviant in a particular way, viz., as mislexicalized.”

CEFR level