This book offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. It charts the evolution of lexical semantics from the mid nineteenth century to the present day, presenting the main ideas, landmark publications, and the dominant figures ofthe the five semantic traditions.

Dirk Geeraerts is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Leuven and head of the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics. He is the author of The Structure of Lexical Variation (1994), Diachronic Prototype Semantics (1997), and Words and Other Wonders (2006) and the editor, along with Hubert Cuyckens, of The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (2007).

• Introduction


• 1: Historical-Philological Semantics


• 2: Structuralist Semantics


• 3: Generativist Semantics


• 4: Neostructuralist Semantics


• 5: Cognitive Semantics


• Conclusion


• References