The lexicon-encyclopedia interface

(Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, 5)

Editor : Bert Peeters

Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2000

Contributors to the volume, which brings together a number of specially commissioned papers, as well as a smaller number of reprints with new afterwords, argue both for and against the distinction between lexical knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge, and debate how it can or should be drawn. The distinction surfaces in many contemporary linguistic theories and has implications for natural language processing.

Reviews and review articles:

Cabrera, Julio. 2001. "Words, worlds, words". Pragmatics & cognition 9. 313-327.
Glaz, Adam. 2002. Language 78. 814.
von Heusinger, Klaus. 2003. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 22. 273-274.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2004. Cognitive linguistics 15(3). 406-419.

Bert Peeters (pp. 1-52)
Setting the scene: Some recent milestones in the lexicon-encyclopedia debate

I. ASSESSMENTS

Anne Reboul (pp. 55-95)
Words, concepts, mental representations and other biological categories

Carlos Inchaurralde (pp. 97-114)
Lexicopedia

John Taylor (pp. 115-141)
Approaches to word meaning: The network model (Langacker) and the two-level model (Bierwisch) in comparison

II. UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING

Pierre Larrivée (pp. 145-167)
Linguistic meaning, knowledge, and utterance interpretation

Keith Allan (pp. 169-217)
Quantity implicatures and the lexicon

William Croft (pp. 219-256)
The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and metonymies

III. WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Richard Hudson & Jasper Holmes (pp. 259-290)
Re-cycling in the encyclopedia

Eva Born-Rauchenecker (pp. 291-316)
Towards an operationalisation of the lexicon-encyclopedia distinction: A case study in the description of verbal meanings in Russian

M. Lynne Murphy (pp. 317-348)
Knowledge of words versus knowledge about words: The conceptual basis of lexical relations

Heidi Harley & Rolf Noyer (pp. 349-374)
Formal versus encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalisations

IV. GRAMMAR

Joseph Hilferty (pp. 377-392)
Grammar, the lexicon, and encyclopedic knowledge: Is there such a thing as informational encapsulation?

Rob Pensalfini (pp. 393-431)
Encyclopedia-lexicon distinctions in Jingulu grammar

V. FURTHER AFIELD

Susanne Feigenbaum (pp. 435-461)
Lexical and encyclopedic knowledge in an ab initio German reading course

Victor Raskin, Salvatore Attardo & Donalee H. Attardo (pp. 463-486)
Augmenting linguistic semantics descriptions for NLP: Lexical knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge, event structure

Author index (pp. 487-491)
Subject index (pp. 493-498)
Language index (p. 499)

What others have said...

"We live today, in ethics as well as in the philosophy of language, in a world where no radical positions are held, where definitions and essences, if admitted at all, are not fixed, eternal or substantive, but changeable, functional and weak, at least within the limits of Analytic philosophy. Semantics appears at present as explicitly trying to escape both from strong Aristotelian meaning-essentialism and from radical Nietzschean meaning-existentialism. Peeters' book has the merit of making this evident."

Julio Cabrera (University of Brasilia, Brasil), in Pragmatics & Cognition 9 (2001), p. 325.

"Apart from its other assets (author, subject, and language indices; rich bibliographical references; careful editorship; and elegant typesetting), the volume is an extremely valuable publication due to the wide range of issues addressed and (often conflicting) solutions proposed. To the interested reader, it is an up-to-date presentation of the state of the art in the lexicon-encyclopedia interface. Many of the points it raises may also become throught-provoking stimuli for further research."

Adam Glaz (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland), in Language 78 (2002), p. 814.

"Der sorgfältig herausgegebene Band ist weitgehend fehlerfrei, hat ein sehr ansprechendes Layout und wird von einem hilfreichen Autoren-, Sach- und Sprachindex abgeschlossen. Die Beiträge zeigen nicht nur, dass die Frage der Interaktion von lexikalischem und enzyklopädischem Wissen in vielen Bereichen der Grammatik eine zentrale Rolle spielt, sondern sie formulieren auch ganz neue Fragen, die wichtige Anregungen zu weiterer Forschung sind. Für jeden, der an diesen Fragen interessiert ist, bildet dieser Sammelband eine spannende, interessante und wichtige Lektüre."

Klaus von Heusinger (Universität Stuttgart, Germany), in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 22 (2003), p. 274.

"The present collection of papers is definitely worth reading. As can be expected, the volume does not provide one universal solution. Instead, it adequately presents the state of the art relative to the lexicon-encyclopedia interface and offers a rich picture of the contemporary lexicon-encyclopedia debate. It includes various approaches and philosophies, a range of different opinions and assumptions about language and lexical meanings. Some of the papers contain original scholarship, some others use the existing paradigms, but the collection is set to become essential reading for anyone studying lexicology and semantics. I recommend the volume to any practising linguists, irrespective of their background and provenance."

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (University of Lodz, Poland), in Cognitive Linguistics 15 (2004), p. 417.