Lexical Structures

A monograph about structural entities originating in the lexicon - that is, about word structure - as well as about the structural characteristics of the lexicon as a module of formal grammar.

I will argue that Giegerich’s study raises a number of important questions which have so far not received the attention they deserve and which have much wider implications than the problem of English compounding. By exploring these questions from the vantage point of a single, relatively well understood phenomenon, Giegerich has been able to put some of those questions into sharp relief and has therefore issued an important challenge to those who wish to understand the more general relationship between morphology, syntax and semantics.

There is a great deal of food for thought in the material G. presents. The discussion of different kinds of attribution is clearer than I have seen elsewhere, the problems of trying to distinguish syntactic NNs from lexical NNs by a number of (largely syntactic) tests is carried out in great detail and with thought to the overall pattern of interaction between lexical and syntactic factors, the problems with a modular approach to morphology and syntax are explored in detail by someone who has been an exponent of just such a modular approach, the differences between various compound types are presented clearly. There is no doubt that this is a major contribution to the literature on this area of grammar (and so, incidentally, a promising start for Edinburgh University Press’s new series).

Heinz Giegerich is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His previous publications include Metrical Phonology and Phonological Structure (CUP 1985), English Phonology (CUP 1992), Lexical Strata in English (CUP 1999) and Lexical Structures: Compounding and the Modules of Grammar (EUP 2015). At EUP he is the editor of the Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language book series and a co-founder of the journal Word Structure.