ABSTRACT
American structural linguistics was notorious for its neglect of meaning. In the generative tradition semantics has in principle been brought back within the fold, in that knowledge of meanings, in some sense, is deemed to be part of linguistic competence; yet the generativist community still handles it warily, and has devoted to it only a fraction of the attention devoted to syntactic and phonological structure. Even the generativist concern with the lexicon, in its morphological aspect, has concentrated more on how ‘morphemes’ are combined than with the search for generalisations about the kinds of meaning that are expressed morphologically and the kinds of expression that these meanings receive. This search is the focus of the work described in this chapter.1
