Lexical item

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The lexical items in a language are both the single words (vocabulary) and sets of words organized into groups, units or "chunks". Some examples of lexical items from English are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by the way", and "don't count your chickens before they hatch". Lexical items are generally understood to convey a single meaning or concept, much as a lexeme does, but are not limited to being just words. Lexical chunks are somewhat like semes in that they are the "natural units" employed when translating from one language to another, or in learning a new language. In this last sense, it is sometimes said that language consists of grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar.

The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis; the origin and importance of lexical units is discussed in greater detail in that article.

Lexical items are also sometimes called gambits, lexical phrases, lexical units, lexicalized stems or speech formulae. The term polyword listemes is also sometimes used. Common types of lexical chunks include^[1]:

Words, e.g. "cat", "tree"
Phrasal verbs, such as "put off" or "get out"
Polywords, e.g. "by the way", "inside out"
Collocations, e.g. "motor vehicle", "absolutely convinced"
Institutionalized utterances. e.g. "I'll get it", "We'll see", "That'll do", "If I were you ...", "Would you like a cup of coffee?"
Idioms, e.g. "break a leg", "... was one whale of a ...", "a bitter pill to swallow".
Sentence frames and heads, e.g. "That is not as ... as you think", "The fact/suggestion/problem/danger was ..."
Text frames, e.g. "In this paper we explore ...; Firstly ...; Secondly ...; Finally ..."

An associated concept is that of noun-modifier semantic relations, wherein certain word pairings have a standard interpretation. For example, the phrase "cold virus" is generally understood to refer to the virus causes a cold, rather than a virus that is cold. The correct semantic relation here is that of causality (the virus causing the cold) as opposed to quality (the virus having the property of being cold).