Storage and Computation in the Language Faculty

Traditionally, computation - the rule-driven manipulation of symbols - as opposed to (lexical) storage, has been the main focus of research in the language faculty. There is, however, increasing evidence of a prominent role of storage. Constructions that could be computed not necessarily always are. In this volume, the relative roles of computation and storage are discussed, both theoretically and on the basis of linguistic, psycholinguistic, and brain-imaging evidence, with respect to a wide range of language phenomena, such as morphological processing, syntactic processing, limitations of parsing mechanisms, neural substrates of short-term storage versus computation, and the processing of discourse. Each chapter has been written by one or more outstanding experts in the field. The contributions are thorough, but at the same time free from unnecessary technical detail, so that the volume is accessible to experienced readers as well as students in linguistics, psychology, and other cognitive sciences.