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In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2014 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Patras on headedness in word formation and lexical semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the contribution of lexical and inflectional morphology features to dependency parsing of Arabic, a morphologically rich language with complex agreement patterns. Using controlled experiments, we contrast the contribution of different part-of-speech (POS) tag sets and morphological features in two input conditions: machine-predicted condition (in which POS tags and morphological feature values are automatically assigned), and gold condition (in which their true values are known). We find that more informative (fine-grained) tag sets are useful in the gold condition, but may be detrimental in the predicted condition, where they are outperformed by simpler but more accurately predicted tag sets. We identify a set of features (definiteness, person, number, gender, and undiacritized lemma) that improve parsing quality in the predicted condition, whereas other features are more useful in gold. We are the first to show that functional features for gender and number (e.g., "broken plurals"), and optionally the related rationality ("humanness") feature, are more helpful for parsing than form-based gender and number. We finally show that parsing quality in the predicted condition can dramatically improve by training in a combined gold+predicted condition. We experimented with two transition-based parsers, MaltParser and Easy-First Parser. Our findings are robust across parsers, models, and input conditions. This suggests that the contribution of the linguistic knowledge in the tag sets and features we identified goes beyond particular experimental settings, and may be informative for other parsers and morphologically rich languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denison distinguishes three main NP constructions with type nouns such as sort/kind/type of in Present-day English, namely the head, postdeterminer and qualifier constructions. The latter two developed from the binominal construction in which lexically full sort/kind/type is the head followed by a second noun designating a superordinate class. In the chronology he posits the postdeterminer construction as an early reanalysis of the binominal construction (c.1390 for all kind of and c.1550 for kind and sort of), whereas the qualifying constructions developed later from it (c.1580 for kind of and c.1710 for sort of), via the mediation of the postdeterminer construction. However, in recent synchronic corpus studies we have distinguished two additional NP constructions with type nouns, namely quantifier and descriptive modifier, on the basis of syntactic, semantic and collocational features. In the present article we consider the diachronic import of these newly distinguished constructions and argue that they are key pivots in the developmental paths that have led from the head construction to constructions in which the type noun is not the head. By thus refining Denison's proposed chronology, we argue that new constructions emerge as the result of complex interlocking paths in which the quantifier and descriptive modifier constructions pre-dated, and helped facilitate and entrench, the postdeterminer and qualifying constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of adjectival diathesis alternations lags behind the study of verbal diathesis and nominalization. This paper aims to diminish the gap by applying to the adjectival domain theoretical tools with proven success elsewhere. We focus on evaluative adjectives, which display a systematic alternation between a basic variant (John was rude) and a derived one (That was rude of John). The alternation brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes - in the semantic type of the predicate, its valency and the mode of argument projection. We argue that the adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: a lexical SATURATION operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic REIFICATION operator (also seen in nominalization). The analysis straightforwardly extends to similar alternations with Subject- and Object-Experiencer adjectives (proud, irritating). Among its important implications are (i) lexical saturation is not restricted to external arguments (internal ones may also be saturated), and (ii) ' referential ' (R) roles are not restricted to nominal predicates (adjectives may assign them as well). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This experiment examined the item-level relationship between 7-year-olds’ ability to read words aloud and their knowledge of the same words in the oral domain. Two types of knowledge were contrasted: familiarity with the phonological form of the word (lexical phonology), measured by auditory lexical decision, and semantic knowledge, measured by a definitions task. Overall, there was a robust relationship between word knowledge and reading aloud success. The association was stronger when words contained irregular spelling–sound correspondences. There was no evidence that a deeper or more semantic knowledge of words was more closely related to reading aloud success beyond the association between reading success and familiarity with the phonological form of the same words. This finding is not compatible with models that see semantics as contributing directly to the reading aloud process, at least during the relatively early stages of reading development. More critical was whether or not a word was considered a lexical item, as indexed by auditory lexical decision performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Event-related potentials were used to investigate if there is a lexical bias effect in comprehension monitoring. The lexical bias effect in language production (the tendency of phonological errors to result in existing words rather than nonwords) has been attributed to an internal self-monitoring system, which uses the comprehension system, and which employs lexical status as a monitoring criterion. It has been suggested that we monitor language comprehension too, and that the P600 reflects comprehension monitoring processes. If both production and comprehension monitoring rely on the comprehension system it is plausible that both processes are very similar. Hence the lexical bias effect is expected in comprehension monitoring. We presented high-cloze sentences that could contain a correct word, a lexical error, or a nonlexical error. There was a larger N400 in the lexical error and the nonlexical error conditions compared with the correct word condition. Importantly, the P600 was the largest in the nonlexical error condition, intermediate in the lexical error condition, and the smallest in the correct condition. Apparently, the comprehension monitor is sensitive to lexicality, suggesting that production and comprehension monitoring use similar criteria for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of affairs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first goal of this study was to examine young children's developing narrative comprehension abilities using theory-based, authentic measures of comprehension processes. The second goal was to examine the relations among young children's comprehension abilities and other early reading skills. Children ages 4 and 6 listened to or watched two authentic narratives. We measured their comprehension of these narratives as well as vocabulary and skills associated with word decoding. The results revealed that even the younger children were sensitive to the underlying structure of the narratives and that this sensitivity increased with age. Measures of narrative comprehension were not consistently correlated with skills associated with word decoding, such as phonological awareness. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical models of comprehension and of reading development. Practical implications of the findings are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first study that reports the lexicality effect (i.e., words read better than nonwords) in Italian with fully transparent and methodologically well-controlled stimuli. We investigated how words and nonwords are read aloud in the Italian transparent orthography, in which there is an almost strict one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Contrary to the claim that in such orthography word naming is accomplished primarily by the nonlexical assembly route, we found that words were named faster than nonwords, regardless of their frequency (high or low) or the composition of the experimental list (pure vs. mixed blocks). These findings show that the lexical route is the main one used by readers even in a language with a transparent orthography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As language teachers, we realize that some mistakes found in our students' output are more serious than others. What may be less obvious, though, is that our judgement of learner error can yield linguistic insights, and that sharpening our error-analysis skills might improve the quality of our error feedback This article presents an error-gravity study, in which written errors made by Hebrew-speaking E FL learners were judged for severity by English teachers in Israel and abroad. The findings show that errors can be viewed as occupying various positions on the lexico-grammatical continuum, and support the claim that lexis and grammar should be considered as interdependent, rather than as two separate entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sinclair’s grammatical work is notable for its strict reliance on performance data and its avoidance of psychological theorising. His argument rests on the observation that large corpora reveal a huge discrepancy between the predictions made by cognitive models of grammar and what actually happens in performance. This discrepancy cannot be explained away by appeal to encoding/processing deficiencies, but must be taken as reason to revise our view of grammar, especially by exploring its interdependence with lexis. In this he follows Halliday’s (1966) idea that every word has its own grammar. Sinclair’s 1991 paper on the word of (‘The meeting of lexis and grammar’) exemplifies his thinking in this area with particular energy and originality. Questioning the traditional classification of of as a preposition, he proposes a new, more semantically based, approach to the analysis of noun phrases traditionally said to contain postmodification of the head with an of-phrase, e.g. the horns of the bull. This chapter reviews Sinclair’s development as a grammarian, examines the arguments of the 1991 paper and suggests that while his work has been radically transformative in linguistics, it should not indefinitely avoid engaging with the problem of how best to represent what it is that we know when we say we know a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view of pattern grammar is that syntactic structures and lexical items are co-selected and that grammatical categories begin to align very closely with semantic distinctions. While this is certainly a valid position when analysing the phenomenon of collocation, it does not really solve the problem for open choice issues. Not all language use can be subsumed under the idiom principle. The noun hatred, for instance, can co-occur with any discourse object for which hatred can be expressed. It can also co-occur with other lexical items standing for various circumstantial aspects. The grammatical structure itself often does not tell us whether we find expressed the object of hatred or some circumstantial aspect, as these structures tend to have more than one reading. Lexicogrammar, or local grammar, is more than equating a syntactic structure with a semantic pattern. We have to be aware of the different functions or readings a given grammatical structure can have. The framework of valency/dependency grammar can help us to make the necessary distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the characteristics and syntactic behaviour of a peculiar construction in which what seem to be two finite complementisers are allowed to co-occur in specific subordinate clauses. As well as providing a detailed description of the structure in a number of Romance varieties, this research focuses on the different roles played by items belonging to the category traditionally labelled as COMP and on the status of the subjects found in the left periphery. Adopting the so-called split-CP hypothesis the proposed analysis argues for the expression of both discourse and inflectional features at the C level, overtly realised as distinct heads, and claims that there are both topicalised and focalised positions available to pre-verbal subjects in the left periphery, be they a DP or a quantified element. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker's emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of verbs which are standardly assumed to require their complements to be presupposed. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in no way presuppositional; that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have common ground status. It is further demonstrated that this loss of presuppositionality is not accompanied by a lack of commitment on the part of the speaker to the truth of the complement, as in the standard cases of non-presuppositional uses of these predicates. It is argued that this non-presuppositional use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition is not a conventional property of lexical items. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines morphophonological alternations involving apicoalveolar tap-consonant clusters in Urban East Norwegian from the framework of gestural Optimality Theory. Articulatory Phonology provides an insightful explanation of patterns of vowel intrusion, coalescence, and rhotic deletion in terms of the temporal coordination of consonantal gestures, which interacts with both prosodic and morphological structure. An alignment-based account of derived-environment effects is proposed in which complete overlap in rhotic-consonant clusters is blocked within morphemes but not across morpheme or word boundaries. Alignment constraints on gestural coordination also play a role in phonologically conditioned allomorphy. The gestural analysis is contrasted with alternative Optimality-theoretic accounts. Furthermore, it is argued that models of the phonetics–phonology interface which view timing as a low-level detail of phonetic implementation incorrectly predict that input morphological structure should have no effect on gestural coordination. The patterning of rhotic-consonant clusters in Norwegian is consistent with a model that includes gestural representations and constraints directly in the phonological grammar, where underlying morphological structure is still visible. On the assumption that Universal Grammar lacks faithfulness constraints on input timing, the phonology is free to include non-contrastive phonetic detail such as intersegmental gestural coordination without the danger of overgenerating impossible contrasts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Phonologically conditioned allomorphy is sometimes determined by universal marking conditions derived from low-ranked constraints, which is viewed as an effect of the emergence of the unmarked (TETU) in optimality theory. In this paper we present two case studies that make crucial use of allomorph selection as TETU but also of an additional property of the lexical representation of allomorphs, namely lexical ordering of allomorphs. The first case is the puzzling selection of definite marker in Haitian Creole (analyzed as an instance of anti-markedness in previous OT works), which yields to an appropriate analysis in terms of allomorph ordering. In the second case study, gender allomorph selection in Catalan, we propose a constraint Respect that ensures compliance with idiosyncratic lexical specifications, which further interacts with allomorph selection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In de Haan & van Esch (2004, 2005) we outline a research project designed to study the development of writing skills in English and Spanish as foreign languages, based on theories developed, for instance, in Shaw & Liu (1998) and Connor & Mbaye (2002). This project entails collecting essays written by Dutch-speaking students of English (EFL writing) and Dutch-speaking students of Spanish (SFL writing) at one-year intervals, in order to study the development of their writing skills, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The essays are written on a single prompt, taken from Grant & Ginther (2000), asking the students to select their preferred source of news and give specific reasons to support their preference. Students' proficiency level is established on the basis of holistic teacher ratings. A first general analysis of the essays has been carried out with WordSmith Tools. Moreover, the texts have been computer-tagged with Biber's tagger (Biber, 1988; 1995). An initial analysis of relevant text features (Polio, 2001) has provided overwhelming evidence of the relationship between a number of basic linguistic features and proficiency level (de Haan & van Esch, 2004; 2005). In the current article we present the results of more detailed analyses of the EFL material collected from the first cohort of students in two consecutive years, 2002 and 2003, and discuss a number of salient linguistic features of students' writing skills development. We first discuss the development of general features such as essay length, word length and type/token ratio. Then we move on to discuss how the use of specific lexical features (cf Biber, 1995; Grant & Ginther, 2000) has developed over one year in the three proficiency level groups that we have distinguished. While the development of the general features over one year is shown to correspond logically to what can be assumed to be increased proficiency, the figures for the specific lexical features studied do not all point unambiguously in the same direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address the role of words in meaning-construction. My starting point is the observation that the ‘meanings’ associated with words are protean in nature. That is, the semantic values associated with words are flexible, open-ended and highly dependent on the utterance context in which they are embedded. In attempting to provide an account of meaning-construction that coheres with this observation I develop a cognitively-realistic theory of lexical representation and a programmatic theory of lexical concept integration. My fundamental claim is that there is a basic distinction between lexical concepts, and meaning. While lexical concepts constitute the semantic units conventionally associated with linguistic forms, and form an integral part of a language user's individual mental grammar, meaning is a property of situated usage-events, rather than words. That is, meaning is not a function of language per se, but arises from language use. I present an account of lexical concepts and the conceptual knowledge structures, cognitive models, with respect to which they are relativised. I also situate this theory within a usage-based account. I then develop a theory of lexical concept integration which serves to provide an account of how lexical concepts are combined in service of situated meaning-construction. As the constructs lexical concept and cognitive model are central to the theory of lexical representation and meaning-construction I present, I refer to the approach developed here as the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, or LCCM Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses general questions about the organization of grammar via a detailed discussion of a small, but well-explored, area of English: the contraction of want to to wanna. It distinguishes three general approaches to the analysis of wanna: a phonological rule, lexicalization, or a derivational rule. Each approach has a different set of strengths, but they all have weaknesses as well. The article then offers a new analysis in terms of REALIZATION, which combines the strengths of all the previous analyses. This analysis, which is based on the theory of word grammar, accounts not only for all the well-known syntactic and morphological constraints on this contraction, but also for a fact that has not been noted before: that, for some speakers, the last vowel alternates in just the same idiosyncratic way as that of to, which suggests strongly that in some sense wanna contains to as well as want. For these (but not all) speakers, the proposed analysis recognizes two words (sublexemes of WANT and TOinf) at the level of syntax and a single form ({wanna}, containing variants of {want} and {to}) at the level of form; the relations between these words and forms, and between the forms and their phonological realizations, are defined by a declarative network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes and explores a natural language processing- (NLP) based strategy to address out-of-dictionary and vocabulary mismatch problems in query translation based English–Chinese Cross-Language Information Retrieval (EC-CLIR). The strategy, named the LKB approach, is to construct a lexical knowledge base (LKB) and to use it for query translation. In this article, the author describes the LKB construction process, which customizes available translation resources based on the document collection of the EC-CLIR system. The evaluation shows that the LKB approach is very promising. It consistently increased the percentage of correct translations and decreased the percentage of missing translations in addition to effectively detecting the vocabulary gap between the document collection and the translation resource of the system. The comparative analysis of the top EC-CLIR results using the LKB and two other translation resources demonstrates that the LKB approach has produced significant improvement in EC-CLIR performance compared to performance using the original translation resource without customization. It has also achieved the same level of performance as a sophisticated machine translation system. The study concludes that the LKB approach has the potential to be an empirical model for developing real-world CLIR systems. Linguistic knowledge and NLP techniques, if appropriately used, can improve the effectiveness of English–Chinese cross-language information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gray & Atkinson's (2003) application of quantitative phylogenetic methods to Dyen, Kruskal & Black's (1992) Indo-European database produced controversial divergence time estimates. Here we test the robustness of these results using an alternative data set of ancient Indo-European languages. We employ two very different stochastic models of lexical evolution – Gray & Atkinson's (2003) finite-sites model and a stochastic-Dollo model of word evolution introduced by Nicholls & Gray (in press). Results of this analysis support the findings of Gray & Atkinson (2003). We also tested the ability of both methods to reconstruct phylogeny and divergence times accurately from synthetic data. The methods performed well under a range of scenarios, including widespread and localized borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more ‘lexical’ of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This ‘lexical’ Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun's interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexeme-formation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not ‘split’, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, and section 4 concludes the argument by hypothesizing that Number not only can, but must have a distinct interpretation as a lexicalized property than as a regular inflectional one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If recognition of a polymorphemic word always takes place via its decomposition into stem and affix, then the higher the frequency of its stem (i.e., base frequency) the easier the lexical decision response should be when frequency of the word itself (i.e., surface frequency) is controlled. Past experiments have demonstrated such a base frequency effect, but not under all circumstances. Thus, a dual pathway notion has become dominant as an account of morphological processing whereby both decomposition and whole-word access is possible. Two experiments are reported here that demonstrate how an obligatory decomposition account can handle the absence of base frequency effects. In particular, it is shown that the later stage of recombining the stem and affix is harder for high base frequency words than for lower base frequency words when matched on surface frequency, and that this can counterbalance the advantage of easier access to the higher frequency stem. When the combination stage is crucial for discriminating the word items from the nonword items, a reverse base frequency effect emerges, revealing the disadvantage at this stage for high base frequency words. Such an effect is hard for the dual-pathway account to explain, but follows naturally from the idea of obligatory decomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some results obtained from quantitative analysis of the texts produced by six Russian schizophrenic patients was analyzed. The analysis shows that there exists some statistical parameters which reflect two major types of verbal-mental disorders. In the first case, an obsession reorders the patient's verbal-mental activity. Consequently, the text is tilled mainly with words and word combinations related to the obsessional topic. The variety of lexical units employed here is restricted, and the are many repetitions. This naturally leads to rapid saturation. This is reflected in the parabolic form of Zipf's curve. Disorders of the second type are characterized by multiple topics and the absence of a consistent subject, the lexicon is here varied and chaotic. Thus such a text represents unsaturated sets having Zipf's parameter ϒ « 1 and small values of Herdan's parameter ϒ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments lA and lB replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger's (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /bRiz/--/bRik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g,,/bR∊z/-/bRik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (e.g.,/bol/-/bot/). Conversely, with a three-phoneme overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes (e.g., /bag∊t//bagaz/). In Experiment 4, an inhibitory effect was again observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme but not when they mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes when the time between the offset of overlapping segments in the primes and the onset of overlapping segments in the targets was controlled for. The data thus indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the relationship between (proper) names and word structure, and specifically with the classification of names and with the role of (classes of) names in lexical derivation. The major source of exemplification is English. §1 outlines the categorization of names proposed in a sister study devoted to syntax of names (Anderson in preparation), as well as other relevant parts of the syntactic description given there. In §2.1 different kinds of personal and place names are differentiated and their more salient morphosyntactic characteristics commented upon. This is followed in §2.1 by a consideration both of the historic sources of names and of some of the properties and functions of systems of naming; and there is noted the typical de-semanticisation of names compared with the common words that are their typical historical source, such that the synchronic role of common (descriptive) elements in name systems tends to be restricted. These discussions are relatively informal, but § offers a more (lexical) derivational processes that can form names and with the role of names in derivational processes forming other names or items of other categories, and the light these throw on the semantics of (classes of) names and naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the lexical decisions on words with regular or irregular spelling-to-sound correspondence. Association of words as pseudohomophones; Nature of the access code; Impact of phonemic processing.

This article talks about universal semantic primitives as a basis for lexical semantics. It notes that the semantic system of a language is like a set of Lego blocks, of different shapes and sizes. The meanings of words are like objects constructed out of various Lego blocks. The purpose of lexical semantics is to study such objects, to deconstruct them into their constitutive building blocks, and to seek generalizations about the different types of building blocks and different ways of putting them together. The main difficulty of lexical semantics is that while it needs a solid foundation in the form of well justified semantic primitives, no set of such primitives is given at the outset, rather, the primitives themselves must be found through large-scale lexicographic investigations, both monolingual and cross-linguistic. This double task of finding the primitives via lexicographic description and basing lexicographic description on the primitives may seem self-contradictory and thus impossible to accomplish.

This paper explores how adults acquire a new lexical item, and how they integrate it into their overall lexical knowledge. It suggests that the findings are relevant both to lexical semantics, and 10 studies of the mental lexicon. In particular, the paper examines how the word wimp and its derivatives (mainly wimpish, wimpishness, and wimp out) have become widely-known in British English in a time-span of around ten years. Wimp-usage predated entry into standard dictionaries, so dictionary consultation is unlikely to have played an important role. This paper therefore analyses a corpus of over 500 occurrences of wimp-words from British newspapers 1990–3, mainly from The Times and Sunday Times, on the assumption that word learning can occur from reading. and that newspaper usage overlaps with ‘normal’ usage. It shows that over 80% of wimp-word tokens contain information on their meaning in the immediate surrounding text. This involved one or more of the following: reference to the sex of the wimp (usually male), collocation with a word indicating feebleness (e.g. ‘paihetic wimp’), contrast with a ‘strong’ non-wimp (e.g. ‘From wimps to warriors’), overt negative evaluation (e.g. ‘reviles as a wimp’). covert negative evaluation (e.g. ‘Who needs an enclosed cockpit? Wimps’). Finally, it argues that ‘the wimp effect’ reinforces the idea that a desirable male is one who is a belligerent action-man, and so promotes and sustains cultural stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore lexical processing in an agglutinative language and the organization of the lexicon. From the point of view of lexical processing the major empirical question that arises in relation to agglutinative languages is whether the morphologically complex words are represented in a holistic or a morphologically decomposed form in the mental lexicon and whether lexical access requires some form of morphological parsing of the word. In this article several possible models are being differentiated. These include holistic word entries, separate morphemic entries, and serially specified morphemic entries. It also briefly reports some preliminary results from two pilot studies which bear on the validity of these models. Both experiments examined the lexical processing of morphologically simple and complex Hungarian words using different on-line techniques.