The Microstructure of Lexicon-Grammar Interaction: A Study of 'Gold' in English and Arabic (review)

This innovative book breaks new ground in crosslinguistic research by focusing on the lexicons of English and Arabic. It presents an analysis of the microstructure of the lexical families of ‘gold’ in English, Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA).

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–13), covers the term lexical family, which is defined as ‘a collection of semantically-related [sic] lexical forms based on the same morpheme’ (4). English has the noun gold and the adjective gold(en). In MSA we note the noun ðahab ‘gold’, adjectives ðahabī (and its feminine, duals, and plurals), the passive participle muðahhab ‘gilt’ and its other derived forms, and the (adjectival) noun ðahabiyya ‘gold medal’.

Ch. 2, ‘Methodology and representation’ (15–89), discusses the authors’ framework for lexicon-grammar interaction. They maintain that they ‘are committed to cognitive theories of meaning’ and that ‘the search for meaning is a search for how speakers of a language conceptualize reality (and fiction as well) in terms of elements of their language’ (15).

The authors explain why they considered lexical families rather than morphemes or lexemes: (i) because of parts-of-speech incongruences, for example, English gold is both noun and adjective; and (ii) because of ‘the competing relation of polysemy and morphologically overt derivation across languages’ (5). They illustrate with Turkish altin, which has five senses as a noun (e.g. ‘gold coin’) and five as an adjective (e.g. ‘lovely’) (5–6). In contrast, German Gold is not used to mean ‘gold coin’. Rather, German uses Goldmünze ‘gold coin’ or Goldstück ‘goldpiece’ (6).

Ch. 3, ‘English’ (91–151), examines data chiefly from the British National Corpus (BNC), all of the Sherlock Holmes novels, and large dictionaries. One of many conclusions offered is that ‘the use of the definite article for marking genericity in the classic sense is restricted to nouns which are lexicalized with a certain SHAPE and behave grammatically like count nouns’ (143).

Ch. 4, ‘Arabic’ (153–254), uses CA data from Al-Hamdānī; modern data are from informants and dictionaries, and five volumes of Miikii, a weekly magazine in both MSA and ECA licensed by Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. One conclusion posited for both MSA and ECA is that indefinite phrases do not occur with generic meaning (242). Another interesting fact is that Arabic genericity uses a definite plural, which corresponds to an English indefinite singular or indefinite plural. Consider: ‘Dogs/a dog may live up to twenty years’ = MSA tastaṭīʕu l-kilābu (def. pl., ‘the dogs’) ʔan taʕīša ʔišrīna sanatan (244).

Ch. 5, ‘Conclusion’ (255–74), summarizes the differences for the ‘gold’ lexical families. One prominent distinction between English and Arabic is that the former can use gold to mean ‘gold medal’ (e.g. ‘He took home the gold in boxing’), whereas neither MSA nor ECA can do this. Another distinction is that English gold has a sense of ‘gold color’ that is absent from Arabic counterparts.

Appendix A consists of three English texts about ‘gold’ taken from the BNC (275–77); Appendix B contains two Arabic texts about ‘gold’, the first of which is CA (279–88), and the second of which is an impromptu ECA recorded monologue (289–98).

This work has been carefully edited and proofread. There is one infelicity (‘medieval Arab national grammarians’ (239) where ‘national’ should be omitted), one error in vocalization (MSA muftāḥun ‘key’ should read miftāḥun), and one typographic error (bitruuh ‘they [people] go’ for bitruuḥ (296)).

The authors demonstrate that the interfacing of lexicon and grammar exemplifies a new perspective in linguistic typology.