Define language and lexicon

Language
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Language
1.0 Language and Lexicon
Language is an intricate process and a form of communication, which is incorporated with thoughts. In essence, the communication of thoughts is via the method of language. Language is understood as a system that is used to communicate or express feelings and thought through written symbols or speech sounds. It is the communicative system that is utilized by a given speech community with its unique grammar, vocabulary, as well as phonological system (Dale, 2009). Language is generally arbitrary, communicative, dynamic, generative, communicative and structured.
Lexicon, on the other hand, is understood as the vocabulary of a language – an individual’s lexical knowledge, and it is a mental dictionary. Lexicon is essentially more along the lines of what written symbols or speech sounds connote in a language. A lexicon consists of many representations of known words and those representations comprise pronunciation, spelling, as well as part of speech for every word (Galloti, 2014). A lexicon assists an individual in a matching process of spoken words and the meaning of those words. As such, people recognize words through this matching process given that spoken words are comparable to lexicon, which is basically a mental dictionary. It is of note that a lexicon is an important facet that is vital for a person’s use of language. If an individual does not know the lexicon of a language, then he or she cannot possibly know the language. It is of note that every culture in the world has its own lexicon and language (Dale, 2009).
2.0 Key features of language
Language is Arbitrary: this implies that there is no intrinsic or innate relation between the words of a given language and their connotations or the ideas that they convey. For instance, there is no particular reason as to why a female adult human being is referred to as Femine in French, Zen in Persian, Aurat in Urdu, and woman in English (Dale, 2009). The selection of a word chosen to signify a certain idea or thing is merely arbitrary but the moment a given word is chosen for a certain referent, it comes to remain that way. It is of note that had language not been arbitrary, then today there would have been just a single language used globally.
Language is symbolic: language is made up of different sound symbols and their graphological counterpart which are used to signify some occurrences, objects, or meaning (Dale, 2009). These symbols are selected arbitrarily and they are accepted and used conventionally. Words as used in any particular language are not simply figures or signs, but rather they are symbols of meaning. In essence, the intelligibility of any language is dependent on an accurate interpretation of these symbols (Galloti, 2014).
Language is social: language is fundamentally made up of conventional communicative signals which human beings employ fo...