The Lexicon in Focus : Competition and Convergence in Current Lexicology

When something is in focus, light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed from different sides. Six views are represented in this volume: a cognitivist view of vagueness and lexicalization, a psycholinguistic view of lexical access in speech production, a patholinguistic view of lexical organization in schizophrenics, and three analyses from different points of view in computational linguistics, which deal with problems of the syntax-semantics interface, compositionality, and systematic polysemy. A metalinguistic initial contribution outlines the historical development of lexical semantics with its complementary, competing and converging strands. The introduction completes this integration of the different facets of research into a wider picture of lexicology.

The Editors: Leila Behrens is currently a researcher at the University of Cologne. Since 1988, she has taught general and theoretical linguistics, and computational lexicology in Munich, Marburg and Cologne. Her research focuses on ambiguity and alternation, lexical typology and cross-linguistic differences in semantics, e.g. in genericity.
Dietmar Zaefferer is currently professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Munich. His first book was a formal treatment of Speech Act Theory. Further interests include linguistic typology, the lexical semantics-syntax interface and lexicogrammatic databases.