The book investigates the interface structure of the lexicon from various perspectives, including typology and processing. It surveys work on verb classes, verb-noun similarities, semantic representations, concepts and constructions of polysynthetic languages, research on the processing of inflectional and derivational elements, and new work on inheritance-based network models. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in all fields of linguistics and in the cognitive sciences.

This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today’s growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1 (A), University of Zurich (English Seminar), course: Lexicography, language: English, abstract: In this paper, 80 lexicographic definitions from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary are classified and evaluated, the basic question being the following: are similar words defined in similar ways? The words are classified according to part of speech, concreteness and word frequency, and eight different ways to define a word are considered. The study confirms that concreteness and part of speech have a considerable impact on the way a particular word is defined in the ALD.

Gives an account of the English verbal lexicon which not only systematizes the meanings of lexemes within a hierarchical framework, but also demonstrates the principled connections between meaning and highlights the syntactic complementation patterns of verbs and the patterns of conceptualization in the human mind. Explains lexical patterning and its relationship with meaning, syntax, and cognition.

Morphology, the science of words, is a complex theoretical landscape, where a multitude of frameworks, each with their own tenets and formalism, compete for the explanation of linguistic facts. The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory is a comprehensive guide through this jungle of morphological theories. It provides a rich and up-to-date overview of theoretical frameworks, from Structuralism to Optimality Theory and from Minimalism to Construction Morphology...

In Paul’s Language of Ζῆλος, Benjamin Lappenga harnesses linguistic insights recently formulated within the framework of relevance theory to argue that within the letters of Paul (specifically Galatians, 1-2 Corinthians, and Romans), the ζῆλος word group is monosemic. Linking the responsible treatment of lexemes in the interpretive process with new insight into Paul’s rhetorical and theological task, Lappenga demonstrates that the mental encyclopedia activated by the term ζῆλος is 'shaped' within Paul’s discourse and thus transforms the meaning of ζῆλος for attentive ('model') readers. Such identity-forming strategies promote a series of practices that may be grouped under the rubric of 'rightly-directed ζῆλος'; specifically, emulation of 'weak' people and things, eager pursuit of community-building gifts, and the avoidance of jealous rivalry.

This collection of articles sketches the complexity of the subject of lexical-semantic relations and addresses semantic, lexicographic and computational issues on an array of meaning relations in different languages. It brings together a variety of linguistic studies on the contextualised construction of synonymy and antonymy in discourse. It shows that research on language and cognition calls for empirical evidence from different sources. This volume demonstrates how the internet, corpus data, as well as psycholinguistic methods contribute profitably to gain insights into the nature of the paradigmatics in actual language use. Furthermore, the volume is concerned with practical and application-oriented research on lexical databases, and it includes explorations of sense-related items in dictionaries from both a text-technological and lexicographic perspective.

The main concern of this work is whether morphemes play a role in the lexical representation and processing of several types of polymorphemic words and, more particularly, at what precise representational and processing level. The book comprises two theoretical contributions and a number of empirical ones. One theoretical paper discusses several possible motivations for a morphologically organised mental lexicon (like the economy of representation view, and the efficiency of processing view), and lays out the weaknesses that are associated with some of these motivations. The other theoretical paper offers an interactive-activation reinterpretation of the findings that were originally reported within the lexical search framework. The empirical papers together cover a relatively broad array of language types and mainly deal with visual word recognition in normals in the context of lexical morphology (derived and compound words). Evidence is reported on the function of stems and affixes as processing units in prefixed and suffixed derivations. The role of semantic transparency in the lexical representation of compounds is studied, as is the effect of orthographic ambiguity on the parsing of novel compounds. The inflection-derivational distinction is approached in the context of Finnish, a highly agglutinative language with much richer morphology than the languages usually studied in psycholinguistic experiments on polymorphemic words. Two other contributions also approach the study object in the context of relatively uncharted domains: one presents data on Chinese, a language which uses a different script-type (logographic) from the languages that are usually studied (alphabetic script), and another one presents data on language production.