In Lexical Strata in English, Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in which alternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the morphological processes of the language. Drawing examples from English and German, he uncovers and spells out in detail the principles of 'lexical morphology and phonology', a theory that has in recent years become increasingly influential in linguistics. Giegerich queries many of the assumptions made in that theory, overturning some and putting others on a principled footing. What emerges is a formally coherent and highly constrained theory of the lexicon - the theory of 'base-driven' stratification - which predicts the number of lexical strata from the number of base-category distinctions recognized in the morphology of the language. Finally, he offers accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English (including vowel 'reduction', [r]-sandhi and syllabification), which both support and are uniquely facilitated by this new theory.

This work offers a survey of methods and techniques for structuring, acquiring and maintaining lexical resources for speech and language processing. The first chapter provides a broad survey of the field of computational lexicography, introducing most of the issues, terms and topics which are addressed in more detail in the rest of the book. The next two chapters focus on the structure and the content of man-made lexicons, concentrating respectively on (morpho- )syntactic and (morpho- )phonological information. Both chapters adopt a declarative constraint-based methodology and pay ample attention to the various ways in which lexical generalizations can be formalized and exploited to enhance the consistency and to reduce the redundancy of lexicons. A complementary perspective is offered in the next two chapters, which present techniques for automatically deriving lexical resources from text corpora. These chapters adopt an inductive data-oriented methodology and focus also on methods for tokenization, lemmatization and shallow parsing. The next three chapters focus on speech synthesis and speech recognition.

The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning. The book proposes a syntactic decompositional view of core verbal meaning, and sets out to account for the variability and systematicity of argument structure realisation across verb types. It also proposes an interesting view of lexical insertion.

Questions about the exact nature of linguistic as opposed to non-linguistic knowledge have been asked for as long as humans have studied language, be it as linguists, philosophers, psychologists, semioticians or cognitive scientists. This work argues both for and against the distinction between lexical knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge.

This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other components of grammar. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending the concept of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linglustics at UCLA.