Jean Aitchison is Emeritus Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. She is the author of numerous books on language, including Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Third Edition, 2001), The Word Weavers: Newshounds and Wordsmiths (2007), Aitchison's Linguistics (Seventh Edition, 2010), and The Articulate Mammal (Routledge Classics Edition, 2011).

Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations and Symbols xiii

Part I: Aims and Evidence 1

1 Welcome to Dictionopolis! 3
The human word-store

2 Links in the Chain 18
Assessing the evidence

3 Programming Dumbella 32
Modeling the mental lexicon

4 Brainy Matters 42
The physical underlay

Part II: Basic Ingredients 51

5 Slippery Customers 53
Attempts to pin down the meaning of words

6 Bad Birds and Better Birds 66
Prototype theories

7 Whispering Chambers of the Imagination 80
Mental models

8 The Primordial Atomic Globule Hunt 90
The search for semantic primitives

9 Word-webs 99
Semantic networks

10 Close Companions 113
Words which cling together

11 Lexical All-sorts 119
Parts of speech

12 Verb Power 131
The role of verbs

13 Bits of Words 145
The internal architecture of words

14 Taking Care of the Sounds 157
Dealing with the sound patterns

Part III: Newcomers 169

15 Multiple Meanings 171
The polysemy problem

16 Interpreting Ice-cream Cones 182
Metaphor and metonymy

17 Globbering Mattresses 194
Creating new words

18 What is a Bongaloo, Daddy? 209
How children learn the meaning of words

19 Aggergog Miggers, Wips and Gucks 222
How children cope with the sounds of words

Part IV: The Overall Picture 235

20 Seeking and Finding 237
Selecting words

21 Organized Guesswork 248
Recognizing words

22 Odd Arrangements and Funny Solutions 261
The organization of the mental lexicon

23 Last Word 267
Final comments and future questions

Notes 270

References 292

Index 327