For the past 50 years, linguists - with their focus on syntax - and lexicographers - with their focus on defining meaning - have largely ignored each other or even been mutually hostile. In recent years, however, more attention in linguistics has switched to the lexicon, while lexicographers have begun to see the need for better theoretical foundations. The two disciplines - linguistics and lexicography - are now beginning to recognize the benefits of interaction. This book, in honour of Patrick Hanks, brings together essays on major theoretical issues in the lexical with essays on issues in practical analysis of the lexicon by some of the world's leading contemporary linguists, lexicographers, and philosophers with an interest in words and meaning. It represents both a dialogue and a variety of significant approaches to fundamental issues in this topic.

The opening paper is a discussion by the late John Sinclair of the fundamentals of phraseology and core meaning, building on his theoretical approach to the relationship between collocation and meaning. The first part also contains important papers by Wilks (on preference semantics), Pustejovsky & Rumshisky (on the generative lexicon), Mel'cuk (on the government pattern), and Wiggins (on paradoxes), advancing our theoretical understanding of the nature of word meaning. The second part is concerned with the computation of lexical relations, and contains contributions by Ken Church (on corpus size), Grefenstette (on the number of concepts), David & Louise Guthrie (on adjectives that predict noun classes), Geyken (on support verb constructions), Pala & Rychly (on word sketches), Cinková, Holub & Smejkalová (on the pattern dictionary of English verbs), and Jezek & Frontini (on the Patternbank). The third part links through to lexical analysis and dictionary writing, with landmark papers by Rosamund Moon (on idioms), Atkins (on a new lexicographical database), Kilgarriff & Rychly (on semi- automatic dictionary drafting), Bogaards (on theory in lexicography), Banko (on the Polish COBUILD), Green (on argot), and Rundell (on elegance in defining). The editor, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, also included an account of the life and work of Patrick Hanks.