La struttura del lessico By Mario Alinei (review)

Abstract

474LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) REFERENCES Bierwisch, Manfred. 1967. Some semantic universals of German adjectives. Foundations of Language 3.1-36. Conklin, Harold C. 1962. Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies. Problems in lexicography, ed. by F. Householder & S. Saporta, 119-41. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. Friedrich, Paul. 1969. On the meaning of the Tarascan suffixes of space. (Indiana University publications in anthropology and linguistics, Memoir 23 of IJAL.) Baltimore. Katz, Jerrold, and Jerry Fodor. 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Lg. 39.170-210. Lakoff, George. 1970. A note on vagueness and ambiguity. Linguistic Inquiry 1.357-9. Lakoff, Robin. 1968. Abstract syntax and Latin complementation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyons, John. 1963. Structural semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. McCawley, James. 1968. Lexical insertion in a transformational grammar without deep structure. Papers from the 4th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 71-80. Teller, Paul. 1969. Some discussion and extension of Manfred Bierwisch's work on German adjectivals. Foundations of Language 5.185-217. Weinreich, Uriel. 1966. Explorations in semantic theory. Current Trends in Linguistics III, ed. by T. Sebeok, 395-477. The Hague: Mouton. Zwicky, Arnold. 1971. In a manner of speaking. Linguistic Inquiry 2.223-32. [Received 28 July 1976] La struttura del lessico. By Mario Alinei. Bologna: U Mulino, 1974. Pp. 264. L 4000. Reviewed by Charmaine Lee, Essex Community College, Baltimore This study presents the results of an experiment in using a computer to analyse the semantic structure ofa language. The basis for the experiment lies in the theories of componential linguistic analysis formulated by Harris, and afterwards by Chomsky, Katz & Fodor, et al. (the opening chapter of the book briefly traces the history of this theoretical background, from its first application to phonology by Jakobson and the Prague School). Alinei's most important advance is that he sets out to find a structure for the entire lexicon—rather than merely limited sections ofit, which may have an easily recognizable structure, but which do not shed light on the vocabulary as a whole. A has therefore fed an average dictionary of Italian into a computer and, on the basis of the dictionary definitions, has begun grouping together all the words—or better still, lemmata—which are linked by one common distinctive feature.1 A detailed description of the structure of two parts of the lexicon, chosen to serve as examples, comprises the central section of the book; these are the lexical 'system' 1 A states that he has chosen the term 'lemma' because it is more precise: 'Fra i diversi termini comuni che indicano l'unità lessicale del vocabulario—lemma, esponente, vocabolo, voce—abbiamo adottato il primo perché: (1) è l'unico ad avère un significato técnico; (2) ha un solo significato; (3) dispone di utili derivazioni, corne lemmatizzare, lemmatico, lemmarlo, anch'esse tecniche' (215, note 24). I have followed him in this, since neither Eng. word or term has any adjective corresponding to lemmatico. REVIEWS 475 of (dog sounds) and the lexical 'domain' of the (horse)—the parentheses are A's device for setting off lexical units. A uses ' domain ' to describe a set of lemmata sharing one feature (here, all terms referring in some way to horses); the 'system', on the other hand, is a smaller grouping within the domain, sharing two distinctive features in the same logico-syntactic relationship to each other. Thus, in the system of (dog sounds), the essential features are (dog) and (sound), where (dog) is the subject with respect to (sound) (53-4). Each domain can be divided into two types of systems: (a) those of the 'central' domain, where the dominant distinctive feature—here (horse)—is the subject, object, or predicate; (b) those of the 'peripheral ' domain, where these functions are carried out by such features as (horseman ), (coach) etc., where (horse) is implied (70). Following this pattern, A divides the domain of the (horse) into 42 lexical systems, which he discusses one by one. Every system contains a base relationship and a series of transformations, numbered according to their lemmatic type (each lemmatic type belongs to one of the four grammatical categories: verbal, nominal, adjectival, or adverbial). Some examples from one system as...