16.2748, Review: Lexicology/Morphology: Cruse et al. (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2748. Sat Sep 24 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2748, Review: Lexicology/Morphology: Cruse et al. (2005)

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1)
Date: 22-Sep-2005
From: Irmeli Helin < irmeli.helin at helsinki.fi >
Subject: Lexikologie / Lexicology 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 16:11:15
From: Irmeli Helin < irmeli.helin at helsinki.fi >
Subject: Lexikologie / Lexicology 
 

EDITORS: Cruse, Alan D; Hundsnurscher, Franz; Job, Michael; 
Lutzeier, Peter Rolf
TITLE: Lexikologie / Lexicology
SUBTITLE: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von 
Wörtern und Wortschätzen / An international handbook on the nature 
and structure of words and vocabularies
SERIES: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / 
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 21/2
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1536.html 

Irmeli Helin, Department of Translation Studies, University of Helsinki

OVERVIEW

This book is the second volume of an international handbook on 
lexicology in the series of famous and comprehensive handbooks of 
linguistics and communication sciences. The books of the series are 
surely well known to and highly appreciated by all students and 
researchers of all areas of linguistics, terminology and translation 
studies. The first volume had concentrated on fundamental questions 
of lexicology such as "word" in context of different theories of 
language and grammar, form and content level of "word" from 
phonology to dimensions of meaning, as well as special forms of 
lexical units and structures. Several articles were also written on the 
architecture of the vocabulary, all of them by famous experts and 
scientists on these fields. 

The second volume maintains the high level of the first, both as to 
authors and to the articles which have been written in German and 
English, as it was the case in the first volume as well. On the first 
pages (Chapter XXIV) of the second volume the methodologies of 
lexicology are contemplated starting with intuition and empirical 
methods, instrumental and statistical methods and ending by 
methodological problems of lexicology caused e.g. by syntagmatic 
relations, word classes or definitions of significant features.

Chapter XXV contains articles about structural properties of 
vocabularies from contrastive and typological points of view. Besides 
lexicology of so called SAE languages (Standard Average European), 
i.e. German, English and French, also word classes of isolating 
languages and lexical categories of polysynthetic languages are 
analyzed in three articles.  After that, nominal and verbal systems of 
classification are being dealt with. These systems are contemplated 
from several points of view, such as gender, aspect, dynamics and 
agent and patient oriented differentiations. 

Chapter XXVI is an extensive report on the special properties of 
vocabularies in the main language families of the world starting with 
indo-European languages and ending with Australian, Papuan and 
Middle American languages. Also lexical structures in Pidgins and 
Creoles, as well as vocabulary of Romany and planned languages 
have been dealt with in special articles.

In the next chapters, Chapter XXVII and Chapter XXVIII, selections of 
regional vocabularies and vocabularies of German and English 
dialects have been analyzed. Chapter XXVII speaks about German 
regional varieties and Chapter XXVIII about English dialects and 
English spoken in Ireland, North America, Australia, Africa and India. 

After chapters discussing dialects in English and German, Chapter 
XXIX starts a new part in the book by looking at the etymology of 
words. At first an English overview is given followed by several 
German expert articles on methods and aims of etymological 
research. The semantic change is observed from the traditional points 
of view but also some new ideas as to word meaning are dealt with. 
The content of the chapter is completed by an article about the 
etymology of roots and about folk etymology.

The next Chapter XXX concentrates on the lexical change in German 
supported by case studies on kinship terms and the lexical field 
of 'qual' as well as on neologisms, archaisms and internationalisms. 

This rather a short chapter is followed by three chapters about 
vocabularies used during special epochs or by famous personalities in 
literature, church and music, or by statesmen and scholars (Chapters 
XXXI, XXXII and XXXIII). The vocabularies of special epochs are 
analyzed starting from the medieval situation of German, English, 
French, Italian and Spanish languages. The development of German 
is dealt with in two different articles written in German and English, 
going from the pre-textual epoch until the epoch of the temporal 
differentiation of German languages within two German states before 
their were reunited in 1990. The chapters about the vocabulary of 
famous personalities contain articles about the language of such 
personalities as e.g.  James Joyce, Jane Austin, Johann Wolfgang 
von Goethe and Jean de la Fontaine from the field of literature and 
e.g. Martin Luther, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Friedrich Nietzsche 
and Immanuel Kant representing the other fields of culture and society 
mentioned above.

Chapter XXXIV goes on towards contrastive studies of lexical fields. 
The review of this theme starts with general observations on kinship 
and color terms and then goes on looking at adjectives of dimension 
and verba dicendi. After these general surveys German and English 
languages are compared by contrastive studies on deontic speech act 
verbs and emotion words. 

Lexicon and grammar are dealt with by the next three chapters 
(Chapters XXXV, XXXVI and XXXVII). At first lexical units are analyzed 
as lexical and grammatical categories in grammatical description. 
Then the concept of "word" is contemplated from the point of view of 
grammatical components. The next chapter begins with changing 
lexical units with notions of paradigm in grammar, followed by 
declension, conjugation and comparison as well as phonetic 
realizations of lexical items in declension and conjugation. The third 
chapter with this theme deals with combinations of lexical units and 
word formation as possibility to extend vocabularies, the role of lexical 
data in semantics and pragmatics as well as with lexicalization and 
grammaticalization.

The following three chapters (Chapters XXXVIII, XXXIX and XL) form a 
unit of observations on mental lexicon. In the first of these three 
chapters, after an overview, word recognition and lexical access are 
dealt with, as well as the processing of ambiguous words. 
Psycholinguistic aspects of word meaning are observed in the last 
article of the first chapter. In the following chapter, vocabularies are 
examined using theories of semantic representation of the mental 
lexicon, then going to vocabularies and brain from neurolinguistic 
perspectives, ending up to the situation of mental lexicon in regard to 
multilingualism. The last of these three chapters concentrates in 
acquisition and loss of mental lexicon. Here the early acquisitional 
phase is analyzed followed by later lexical and semantic development 
of word meaning and idioms in mental lexicon. The loss of mental 
lexicon is scrutinized by language pathology and by processes in 
impaired comprehension or problems with verbs suffixes and function 
words as well as with difficulties with words in communicative contexts. 

Last but not least is the Chapter XLI concerning lexicology and 
neighboring disciplines. This is a fairly large chapter and it deals with 
the relations of lexicology to twelve other disciplines starting from 
lexicography and going on by e.g. terminology, text linguistics and 
translation studies until language planning, computer linguistics, 
artificial intelligence and psychology. 

DISCUSSION

This bilingual handbook, written in German and English, incorporate 
1013 pages which contain 124 articles of important and useful 
information about modern theories of lexicology illustrated by practical 
examples. The articles have been written by famous international 
experts on lexicology and linguistics, and most of the contemporary 
lexicologists are mentioned and quoted in the articles. Since 72 of the 
articles were written in German and many further articles are authored 
by European experts, the book is firmly based on the long European 
tradition of lexicology but also refers to the newest research done all 
over the world on this field (e.g. Chapters XXVI and XXVIII) and in 
other disciplines (Chapter XLI). Lexicology is, as shown by the last 
chapter, often considered as a complex discipline with relations to 
many other, not only linguistic disciplines (see e.g. chapters of mental 
lexicon vs. cognitive sciences). 

The articles are composed and edited in a way giving both 
researchers and students of linguistics or other subjects related to 
languages new impulses and constructive information. This 
information can be used in the fields where analysis and knowledge 
about word formation and vocabulary are needed. The amount of 
information collected for this book (Volume 2) is enormous, both 
quantitatively and qualitatively, and it is still much larger, if both 
volumes are regarded. In general, the new handbook is obviously the 
most extensive and versatile publication in lexicology as an 
independent field of research. All through the book, the relationship of 
lexicology to other linguistic disciplines runs as the main thread, even 
if the editors have succeeded in grouping the themes under 
excellently combining titles, always given in both languages, in spite of 
the language the articles are written in. The articles under these titles, 
as well as those in Volume 1, represent as many and as up-to-date 
subfields of research of words and vocabulary as possible by 
informing the readers about respective methodologies and results of 
field studies. In this way, an overview of the present state of research 
is offered to the reader with impulses for new research and 
multidisciplinary viewpoints towards such aspects of lexicology 
perhaps still needing further scrutiny. 

As a researcher and user of many previous handbooks of this series 
(e.g. semantics, pragmatics, terminology and translation studies) I 
was, again, pleasantly surprised about the high quality of the book 
and enjoyed the articles very much. I also highly appreciate the 
decision of the editors to accept articles written in more than one 
language throughout each volume of this series of handbooks. As to 
the volume reviewed, I would especially like to emphasize the chapters 
about the vocabulary of German and English dialects. They give an 
easily accessible source to be used for even contrastive studies of 
dialects, which still need a steady lexicological base although research 
of dialects in multimedia is gaining ground from the traditional 
dialectology concentrating on phonology and morphology of dialects. 
The articles about two different Germans and several different 
Englishes form an interesting aspect in this area. These themes are of 
course not new, but I appreciate very much that they have been taken 
into this handbook.

As a supervisor and university teacher I am glad to be able to 
recommend the new handbook of lexicology to my graduate and post-
graduate students. There are several themes and articles which are 
very useful for their learning and their studies and papers of 
linguistics, translation studies and foreign languages. But naturally, it 
is a useful source for every researcher who needs information about 
the newest state of word and vocabulary studies, and an interesting 
resource of information for everyone interested in these aspects of 
language. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Irmeli Helin is Professor of Translation Studies and Head of the 
Department of Translation Studies at the University of Helsinki, 
Finland. She teaches German translation and interpretation and is a 
docent of terminology and German translation. She has published 
books and articles on terminology, lexicography and lexicology in 
German and Finnish. Her present interest lies in evidentiality and 
translation of evidentials and evidentiality, research of terminological 
concepts, dialect translation and retranslations.





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