Lexie and Lexicalization

According to Pottier (see Bibliography), the lexie is an expression consisting in one or more words which behave as single lexical unit.

There are three main types: simple, which corresponds to the word in its most common meaning (e.g.. "horse", "eating"); compound, consisting in two or more words integrated in one single form (es. "biotechnology", "videoplayer"); complex, consisting in a sequence of words subject to lexicalization (e.g.. "in my opinion", "chamber of commerce").

Lexicalization is the linguistic process through which a syntagm (a sequence of words) becomes a lexical unit or behaves as such.

In T-LAB the Multiwords List option allows the user to produce a list of the complex lexies present in the corpus and to proceed with their transformation into unit strings (lexicalization).