The Lexicon. An Introduction.

This is an essay on the structure of the lexicon and the nature of words. It describes their definition, identification, and classification and their forms and meanings, as well as the relationships between them. The book is divided into six chapters. The first covers basic terminological issues (such as lexicon vs. dictionary) and discusses different conceptions of what counts as a word. The second examines the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic information contained in the lexicon and considers the distinction between lexical information and commonsense knowledge. Chapter 3 goes into more detail about the encoding of meaning in words: after discussing referential, conceptual, prototype and distributional theories of lexical meaning, the author explores notions of homonymy, polysemy, and compositionality, and considers insights from generative lexicon theory concerning, for example, pragmatic and semantic ambiguity. In chapter 4 she focuses on the division of words into classes and subclasses, and in chapter 5 shows how the lexicon can be organized around patterns of association which reflect our vision of the world. She ends by examining the meanings and forms of complex espressions such as phrases and compounds.