"[W]ell worth reading.... For those who are unfamiliar with the emerging field of lexical semantics... it will present an interesting entry point. For those who work in the field, it covers a wide range of interesting and serious problems, in ways that suggest fruitful interaction with a variety of other views and approaches."
-- J. Terry Nutter, Computational Linguistics

"No one has more clearly challenged the assumptions of traditional lexicography."
-- George Miller, Princeton University

The Generative Lexicon presents a novel and exciting theory of lexical semantics that addresses the problem of the "multiplicity of word meaning"; that is, how we are able to give an infinite number of senses to words with finite means. The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.