The Microstructure of Lexicon-Grammar-Interaction: A Study of “Gold“ in English and Arabic

This books presents an entirely new approach in cross-linguistic research. Aiming at a typological comparison of the interaction between lexicon and grammar in English and two varieties of Arabic (Standard and Egyptian Arabic), the authors proceed from fine-grained analyses of single lexical families rather than lexical fields or grammatical categories. Using the family of English gold and the corresponding Arabic families dahab and dahab as an exemplary case study, they compare lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic properties of the microstructure of these families in a very detailed fashion. As amply demonstrated throughout this book, the microstructural method enables the linguist to capture subtle hidden properties revealing evidence for fundamental cross-linguistic differences that cannot be arrived at on the basis of coarse-grained macrostructural typologies. The microstructural approach is crucially associated with a corpus-based method of data acquisition and a multidimensional framework of representation. Leila Behrens is specialized in semantics (e.g. ambiguity, genericity), lexicon-grammar interaction, and questions of representation in a cross-linguistic research context. Hans-Jürgen Sasse is a typologist with particular interest in linguistic categorization. He is specialized in Afroasiatic languages, including Arabic.