Minimising or Maximising Storage? An Introduction

1. Why this volume? “The lexicon is really an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities”. These words, written a long time ago by Leonard Bloomfield (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 274), have set the stage for focusing linguistic and psycholinguistic research on the compositional nature of linguistic objects, a view that has culminated, from the mid-fifties until today, in generative linguistics as proposed and elaborated by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, 1957; 1965). This attention for the computational nature of language over many decades of linguistic investigation has proven to be tremendously fruitful. Without it, our insight in the nature of human language would be much smaller than it is. Inevitably, the continually high level of attention for computational rules has led to some neglect of the possibility of massive storage not only of irregular but also of regular linguistic objects. The idea for this volume was inspired by the observation that a growing number of linguists and psycholinguists are dissatisfied with the traditional Bloomfieldian idea that the lexicon is a list of irregularities, and all other linguistic objects are computed by rules. So the question appeared to be: if Bloomfield’s view was wrong, or at least not the full truth, what then is stored in the lexicon, and what is computed by rule?