[HPSG-L] Book announcement: Word Meaning and Syntax

[Stephen Wechsler]

Dear colleagues,
I'm pleased to announce the publication of:

Word Meaning and Syntax-- Approaches to the Interface
by Stephen Wechsler (Chapter 6 'The lexical-constructional debate' is
coauthored by Stefan Müller)
Oxford University Press
2015;  376 pages
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199279883.do
http://global.oup.com/academic/product/word-meaning-and-syntax-9780199279883
ISBN-13: 9780199279883 (hb) / 9780199279890 (pb)

This book examines the nature of the interface between word meaning and
syntax. It approaches the interface from both sides of the relation,
connecting the philosophical, psychological, and linguistic literature on
word meaning, on the one hand, with the theory of syntactic argument
realization on the other.  The book begins with a look at problems of word
meaning proper: polysemy, vagueness, normativity (lexical entrainment
effects, etc.), prototype effects, coercion, sense extension, and so on.
Then it surveys a range of views on the mapping between words and syntax,
with an emphasis on lexical approaches to argument structure, and addresses
various theoretical controversies concerning lexical decomposition,
neo-davidsonianism, lexicalism, and so on.

Chapter 6 'The lexical-constructional debate', which is coauthored with
Stefan Müller, is an extended argument in favor of lexical valence
structures and lexical rules.  We review familiar arguments from the
history of the field and also add some new ones.  That chapter appeared in
revised form last year as a target article in the journal Theoretical
Linguistics under the title 'Lex­i­cal Ap­proach­es to Ar­gu­ment
Struc­ture' (The­o­ret­i­cal Lin­guis­tics 2014, 40(1–2), 1–76).  The
Theoretical Linguistics volume also contains commentaries by Afra Alishahi,
Hans C. Boas, Adele E. Goldberg, László Kálmán, Paul Kay, and Gregory
M. Kobele, as well as our reply to those commentaries.