About the Book

This new Routledge Major Work is a six-volume collection of nearly one hundred papers, articles, and extracts covering every aspect of lexicology. It ranges over philosophy of language, prototype theory, artificial intelligence, cognitive linguistics, systemic linguistics, structuralism (European and American), generative lexicon theory, meaning-text theory, natural semantic metalanguage theory, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and child language acquisition. Carefully edited extracts from writings on the lexicon by Aristotle, Wilkins, Leibniz, and Wittgenstein make the central observations of these great thinkers readily available to scholars and students. And major articles by lexical semantic field theorists (Trier, Porzig, Gipper, and Coseriu) are made available for the first time in English translation. A general introduction by Patrick Hanks, a leading scholar in the field, gives a comprehensive overview of the subject and its main issues.