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James Pustejovsky & Olga Batiukova, The Lexicon

Cambridge University Press, 2019, 422 pages
Frédérique Brisset
Bibliographical reference

James Pustejovsky & Olga Batiukova

The Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, coll. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, Cambridge, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-521-54795-6, Price: €32.67, 422 pages.

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  • 1 The book comes in three formats: hardback, paperback and digital. The version discussed here is the (...)
  • 2 This might be a useful addition to another textbook, by Elisabetta Ježec, The Lexicon. An Introduct (...)

1Authored by James Pustejovsky, a specialist in linguistics and computation from Brandeis University, Massachusetts, and Olga Batiukova, a researcher in lexical theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, and designed for undergraduate students and their instructors, this textbook1 is part of the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, which counts 79 titles so far. It is therefore intended as a comprehensive introduction to the topic2, organised in three parts and eleven chapters.

  • 3 The resources consist mostly of teaching aids, available for registered users, including exercises (...)

2The first part presents the lexicon in linguistic theory, drawing on numerous theoretical approaches; the second one is devoted to the study of lexical structures, and the third one offers an overview of the lexicon as a system. Each chapter provides an introductory “Overview” and a final “Summary” sections, and comes with figures and tables and a set of exercises, for which answers are to be found at the end of the volume. A 17-page alphabetical glossary, a list of references, two subjects and names indexes make it easy to browse through. The volume is indeed very didactic, with further readings recommendations proposed, divided into primary and secondary references lists, as well as additional online resources3.

3As stated in the preface, which outlines the aim of the monograph, the prospective audience it is written for, the features, organization and conventions of the volume, though relying on “no single syntactic framework in linguistics”, the authors mostly draw on generative and structural principles (p. xv); and they are keen on contextualising the contents they offer, with data-oriented explanations, as they claim to make them accessible to undergraduate students and non-specialists readers interested in lexicology.

4The first part of the textbook is particularly extensive, encompassing numerous eras and varied “schools” in the apprehension of the lexicon as a linguistic item: its 23-page long introductory chapter offers an overview of the lexicon as a whole, before defining the word as a language unit, through spelling, phonology, semantics and functional approaches, introducing, afterwards, lexicography and morphology basics, and the notion of grammar. Chapter 2 and its 25 pages are devoted to syntactic issues such as word order, determiners, countability, among others. Chapter 3 is the most substantial (44 pages), and provides a diachronic overview of lexicon theories, from philosophy to etymology to structuralism. This last approach is divided into generative grammar, which occupies a 7-page section, lexicalized grammar with 6 pages, lexical functional grammar and its 4 pages and construction grammar which runs on 5 pages, while the generative lexicon theory is dealt with within a 9 page section, the authors emphasizing the importance of lexicon as a “dynamic” module far from its original status as a “passive” grammatical item (p. 88). The many charts and tables illustrating those sections are very relevant and pedagogic in order to introduce such concepts as syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, sublexical structures, lexical matrices and lexical fields, for instance. Chapter 4 (22 pages) deals with semantics: notions like sense and reference, connotation and denotation, literal meaning and non-literal expressions, intension and extension introduce the issue of lexical interpretation. The last chapter of part I describes, along its 28 pages, four main semantic frameworks, i.e. formal semantics, conceptual semantics, cognitive linguistics and natural semantic metalanguage: the authors stress that, despite their differences, all proponents share a common feature, in that they draw on semantic decomposition to account for lexical meaning.

  • 4 These notions are also considered later on, in chapter 10, from a user-oriented angle, i.e. speech (...)
  • 5 On that particular issue, see Lexis 17: “Humor, creativity and lexical creation”, 2021.

5Part II is divided into 4 chapters devoted to lexical structures, with, first of all, the 35 pages of chapter 6 dealing with the structure of lexical entries. The authors make an important distinction between dictionary entries as human artefacts, which “relate words to other words” and “theoretical lexicon [which] structures the content of a word’s meaning” (p. 147, original emphasis). The different views held by generative and cognitive linguists help understand the underlying concept of linguistic versus extra-linguistic knowledge. This chapter is very helpful in understanding the different resources exploited by dictionaries to define words: hyperonymy, synonymy, antonymy, extension, ostension, and context are exemplified here4. It shows that lexicographers can turn to several linguistic components to define words: argument structures and predication, event structures (durativity, boundedness, dynamicity, telicity, iteration, intensity), and qualia structures which involve four aspects – formal, agentive, telic and constitutive roles. The chapter goes on with the conceptual structures useful in defining words, i.e. image schemas, metaphors and semantic frames and scenes, as well as conventional attributes, before describing lexical entries properties which may prove problematic, mainly ambiguity, polysemy and homonymy and the tests that can be conducted to understand those, which, all in all, remain essential in stimulating lexical creativity5. The twenty pages of chapter 7 explain how lexical meaning is constructed, by way of decomposition processes involving several strategies. Pustejovsky and Batiukova favour a structured predicate-based decomposition treatment for, so they argue, it minimizes the “need for identifying primitive meaning components” (p. 200). This leads them to present a typology of semantic categories: first natural and artefactual types, then complex types, but they reckon that lots of words can be related to different semantic types, which ponders the previous assertions introduced in that short chapter. Chapter 8 details, along its 40 pages, the behaviour of argument structures within major lexical categories, first verbs, which are of course most of all bound to encode predication or relations, but also, as argued by the authors, all other major categories. This gives them the opportunity to explore the notions of arguments and default arguments, adjuncts, compatibility, informativeness and semantic roles within nouns, adjectives and prepositions as well. Lexical aspect, tense and modality are the subjects of the 38 pages of the last chapter in this part, in order to better understand event structures. If verbs are most concerned here, the authors demonstrate that nouns and adjectives can denote events, too.

6Part III builds on the previous chapters to explore the lexicon as a system within 2 chapters. Chapter 10 focuses on the “general architecture of the lexicon” in 34 pages. Under this general title, the reader will find an attempt at answering a most interesting question: how is the lexicon organised so that speakers can acquire, store and use it? It is indeed an innate challenge for any individual to deal, consciously but often unconsciously, with their native vocabulary, whether it be active or passive, and the underlying mechanisms are presented here. The authors consider two types of hierarchy inherent to the lexicon, the syntactic one and the semantic one, then the relations between them. Those include for instance hyperonymy and hyponymy, opposition or synonymy. Another lexical resource available to speakers is word-internal composition, with phenomena such as inflection and derivation. Finally, the 38 pages of chapter 11 describe the main processes allowing the combination of lexical items into linguistic expressions. This process implies their inclusion into grammatical systems and involves issues pertaining to syntax and pragmatics, which call for further research into lexical pragmatics. For, as the authors themselves ask, “where does the domain of lexical semantics end and the domain of world knowledge begin?” (p. 355).

7The Lexicon is both ambitious and pragmatic. Warning boxes inside the main text frame useful exceptions to the rules explained and terminological difficulties. Clue and comment boxes highlight definitions, historical details or data from foreign language and they draw the readers’ attention on specific and/or important points, denoting the very user-oriented perspective chosen by the authors and editors, which is obvious too in the care taken to provide a very detailed glossary the reader can easily refer to at the end of the volume. It must also be said that the book has benefitted from a very close proof-reading process as very few typing errors occur along the lines (one exception is the spelling “aphabetically” p. 5).

8Some chapters may nonetheless be somewhat difficult to grasp for undergraduate students. However, the very well-structured organization of the volume will allow teachers to make use of it occasionally if need be, according to their curriculum objectives and their students’ academic level. Some sections will come handy for introductory purposes while others may prove useful for advanced courses. The whole book will also be of interest to linguists and specialists in language acquisition looking for an up to date and valuable synthesis on the lexicon in both theoretical and applied fields.

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Notes

1 The book comes in three formats: hardback, paperback and digital. The version discussed here is the paperback edition.

2 This might be a useful addition to another textbook, by Elisabetta Ježec, The Lexicon. An Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2016, reviewed in Lexis by Cathy Parc (https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/3529), which happens to be recommended by the authors (p. xv).

3 The resources consist mostly of teaching aids, available for registered users, including exercises answers, powerpoint presentations, figures and tables, as well as assessment material.

4 These notions are also considered later on, in chapter 10, from a user-oriented angle, i.e. speech acquisition and usage, an interesting distinction to be made, even though it means a little redundancy here and there.

5 On that particular issue, see Lexis 17: “Humor, creativity and lexical creation”, 2021.

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References

Electronic reference

Frédérique Brisset, James Pustejovsky & Olga Batiukova, The LexiconLexis [Online], Book reviews, Online since 24 August 2025, connection on 08 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/9852; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14ias

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About the author

Frédérique Brisset

Frédérique Brisset, ULR CECILLE, Université de Lille, France

Spécialiste de traduction et traductologie (anglais-français), Frédérique Brisset est docteure en études anglophones de l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle et Maîtresse de Conférences honoraire à l’Université de Lille. Elle mène ses recherches principalement en lexicologie contrastive, traduction audiovisuelle, traductologie et stylistique. Elle a co-dirigé avec Corinne Oster le numéro 25 de Lexis, « Genre et lexique » (2025) et récemment rédigé un chapitre d’ouvrage sur la traduction audiovisuelle du lexique culinaire (Mickaël Mariaule & Samuel Trainor [dirs.]), à paraître chez Artois Presses Université.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-SA 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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