The word meanings given in dictionaries normally are “pragmatic meanings,” that is, utterance meanings in prototypical situations. Those glosses are perfectly adequate for the needs of the normal dictionary user but they do not meet scientific standards. As H. P. Grice and L. Horn have shown in various publications, the apparent meanings of many words are in fact combinations of their lexical meanings proper and some superimposed conversational implicatures. Many contradictions can only be avoided by keeping these two parts separate. For example, the use of the adjective rectangular often (but not always) is interpreted as a significant non-use of the (stronger) alternative square. The adjective rectangular thus acquires a second, pragmatic reading ‘rectangular but not square’ that is hyponymous to its semantics; the word appears to be hyponymous to itself, in other words, to be an “autohyponym” (Horn 1984c:110). The purpose of this paper is to show that autohyponymy is pervasive in the lexicon, occurring with nouns, verbs, (scalar/degree) adjectives, conjunctions (e.g., the conditional if); it also occurs in word formation (the German feminine suffix -in), and grammar, for example, the absolute comparative (ein älterer Mann). The data are largely taken from German.This paper is dedicated to Ekkehard König on the occasion of his 60th birthday, January 15, 2001. I am indebted to the anonymous readers of this paper for many very helpful comments.

We argue that the distribution of definiteness marking in Scandinavian DPs is best accounted for by a lexical rule converting Ns to Ds, and not by syntactic head movement. The proposed lexical rule, together with the assumption that lexical expressions can block equivalent phrasal expressions, is shown to account for the core facts about definiteness marking distribution in Danish, and is extended to Swedish and Norwegian. In addition, some previously mysterious facts about definiteness marking in DPs containing relative clauses are explained.

In this creative and ambitious book, Giegerich undertakes perhaps the most comprehensive study ever of phonology-morphology interaction in English in the framework of lexical phonology and proposes major modifications of certain aspects of the theory. The book is full of interesting and thought-provoking claims, supported by thorough empirical demonstrations. At the same time, however, it is curiously out of touch with recent developments in the field. For example, Optimality Theory, which has become the de facto lingua franca of phonologists, is not even mentioned. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that many developments in the 1990s in the framework of lexical phonology are also ignored. For example, although Giegerich devotes a whole chapter to Strict Cycle effects, he fails to acknowledge Kiparsky's (1993) approach to such effects (now properly called Non-Derived Environment Blocking, though Giegerich continues to use the outdated term) based on Radical Underspecification and structure-filling default rules.

In this volume, Marcin Krygier seeks to chronicle the loss of morphological alternations resulting from Old English i-umlaut in the inflectional systems of the various dialects of Middle English. The author argues that while the extent of i-umlaut in Old English is well researched, no detailed analysis of the subsequent process of leveling of i-umlaut alternations in Middle English has been produced. To address this lack of analysis of the Middle English i-umlaut alternations, the author organizes the volume into three main parts.

In recent years, the study of negation has motivated an impressive amount of work devoted to the study of the grammatical representation of sentential negation and its implications for syntactic and semantic theory (see the bibliography in Horn and Kato 2000 for a reasonably exhaustive compilation). The current volume includes twelve papers, the majority presented at a conference in Leiden in late 1994, that examine a range of intersecting issues in the historical development of modern English negation. While the papers are ordered alphabetically in the volume, they fall into two natural classes as defined by theoretical or descriptive orientation: four are explicitly directed to current issues in generative theory, while the remaining eight are of a more purely descriptive nature, although these papers contain sufficient detail to be of interest to practitioners of a variety of grammatical frameworks. I will briefly summarize the papers in the volume before commenting on selected points.

This volume contains thirty-five articles dedicated to Dieter Stellmacher, professor for Low German language and literature at the Universität Göttingen. The articles address a wide range of topics with an emphasis on German and Low German philology and linguistics. A number of articles are also devoted to literature and to linguistic topics in languages other than German or Low German. Most of the articles in this volume are fairly short, but they are generally of high quality. In addition to articles, this volume contains a list of approximately 200 well-wishers and a list of Dieter Stellmacher's numerous publications.