mislexicalize

From mis- +‎ lexicalize.

mislexicalize (third-person singular simple present mislexicalizes, present participle mislexicalizing, simple past and past participle mislexicalized)

1. (linguistics) To lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.
   • 1977, Harold Victor Clumeck, Studies in the Acquisition of Mandarin Phonology, page 44:

     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.

   • 1993, OTS Yearbook - Volume 7, page 86:

     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.

   • 1995, William Churchill Houston Philip, Event Quantification in the Acquisition of Universal Quantification, page 27:

     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

   • 2015 November, William G. Lycan, “Slurs and lexical presumption”, in Language Sciences, volume 52:

     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.