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• Covers the period from the beginning of the 19th century up to the present day
• Brings together the various approaches to lexical semantics in a clear and insightful architecture of affinities and dissimilarities, of theoretical tensions and descriptive elaborations
• Reveals the underlying lines of development in what otherwise might seem a chaotic and unstructured field
• Focuses on essential currents and undercurrents, but also provides suggestions for further reading coupled to a large reference section of 800 items

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and the dominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond a mere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.

Readership: Students of language and linguistics from intermediate level onwards, as well as scholars interested in the lexicon in fields such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies, linguistics, and cognitive science.