Dirk Geeraerts' Theories of lexical semantics is an exceptionally useful book. Covering the history of Western traditions of study of word meaning, the book synthesizes a wealth of original material from the nineteenth century to the present in terrifically well-organized chapters and clearly written prose. The theoretical perspectives are classified into five major categories, which roughly follow chronological developments in the field: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neo-structuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. Geeraerts aims to contextualize each perspective in terms of the concurrent trends in linguistics and relevant cognate fields, and highlights its main thinkers, major innovations, and lasting effects on the discipline, while also noting shortcomings in terms of theory-internal consistency and empirical validity.

The book's front matter consists of a ‘Preface’ and an ‘Introduction’. In the preface, Geeraerts answers the question that naturally arises when one sees this particular author's name on a book whose title advertises a dispassionate overview:

Because cognitive semantics (and Geeraerts) is interested in the relationship between meaning and concepts, other perspectives are reviewed with regard to their take on that relationship, and Geeraerts' organization of the field into five traditions is informed by changes in that relationship.

In the introduction, Geeraerts lays out the scope, restrictions, purpose and audience, as well as the organization and perspective of the book. Here we are introduced to the five traditions, which are not entirely distinct: ‘lexical semantics is not just a succession of more or less unrelated approaches, but … there are both lines of contrast and similarity that link the theories to one another’ (xvii); this succession ‘does not in general imply that the older theory was simply refuted on empirical grounds and replaced by a better theory’ (xviii). The reader is warned that this is not an introductory textbook – as we can tell in later chapters by the fact that the author assumes the reader's familiarity with much semantic terminology. Neither is it a comprehensive history of all the thinkers in each tradition – Geeraerts tends to use certain theorists to characterize the thinking in a tradition, then note where others have made additional or variant contributions. His purpose is to ‘reconstruct the logic’ (xvii) behind the evolution of these perspectives, attending to both the currents and the undercurrents determining their directions. While the book is a work of deep and broad scholarship, Geeraerts has chosen to minimize in-text citation of secondary sources. Each tradition-based chapter ends with a substantial discussion of ‘Further sources’.

Chapter 1 starts us off with the ‘Historical–philological semantics’ of circa 1830–1930. First, three traditions that predate and contribute to ‘The birth of lexical semantics’ (Section 1.1) are discussed: speculative etymology, the rhetorical tradition, and lexicography. Next we have the psychological turn that marks Michel Bréal's Essai de sémantique (1897), complemented by the context-based perspective of Hermann Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). Discussion of these two influential works allows for an overview of ‘Variant voices’ (Section 1.2.3) during the period, organized in terms of the ways in which they differ from Bréal or Paul, and thus allowing for mention of a range of important names (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Antoine Meillet) and concepts (e.g. onomasiology versus semasiology) that emerged in this period. Classification of semantic change is deemed ‘the main empirical output of historical-philological semantics’ (25). Geeraerts provides a classification of the classifications of semantic change and discusses the level of variation to be found in the lower levels of classification of changes and the complexities of these systems, paying substantial attention to the taxonomies of Albert Carnoy (Reference Carnoy1927) and Gustaf Stern (Reference Stern1931) . Lastly, Geeraerts reviews the lasting contributions of this tradition, particularly that it highlights meaning's dynamic nature and the relation of meaning to mind, while critiquing its use of empirical evidence.

Chapter 2 covers ‘Structuralist semantics’, which sees a shift toward the synchronic and a shift away from treating meaning as a psychological phenomenon. The movement away from historical–philological semantics is personified in Leo Weisgerber's critique of it (Weisgerber Reference Weisgerber1927) and his promotion of an onomasiological perspective. Geeraerts then classifies structuralist approaches into three types, discussing each in its own section. The first, ‘Lexical field theory’ (Section 2.2) concentrates on the model developed by Jost Trier (Trier Reference Trier1931) and its legacy. Section 2.3, ‘Componential analysis’, initially concentrates on its history in the United States, where the structuralist phonology of Leonard Bloomfield and anthropological-linguistic studies in the 1950s can be seen as setting the scene for generativist componential approaches. Meanwhile in Europe, Louis Hjelmslev, Bernard Pottier, Eugenio Coseriu, and A. J. Greimas developed their own terminologies for componential semantics, each with its own relations to Saussure or the lexical field tradition. Finally in ‘Relational semantics’ (Section 2.4), we see the development of structuralist ideas toward a focus on opposition as an organizing principle in the lexicon and semantic relations among words as a (if not the) major topic of lexical semantic study in the work of John Lyons and Alan Cruse. Geeraerts concludes that the relational approach fails to meet the structuralist ideal, in that relations themselves cannot be established without contextualized readings of the words in question. In ‘Beyond structuralist semantics’ (Section 2.5), Geeraerts summarizes the inherent problems of structuralist approaches: (a) the oversimplistic and unsupportable view of polysemy (due to inattention to the semasiological perspective) creates oversights in the field and relational analyses as well as disconnecting the field from diachronic analysis; (b) the view of language as a system unto itself is difficult to maintain when the subject is semantics; (c) the onomasiological perspective does not regularly address the pragmatic issue of how speakers choose among words within a semantic field.

Chapter 3, ‘Generativist semantics’, presents the Katzian componential framework, the ‘catalyst in the development of lexical semantics’ (102), melding formalism and a psychological perspective. The well-known problems with the approach are covered: the projection problem, the lack of psycholinguistic performance evidence, and the questionable division between different levels of semantic component (marker and distinguisher) and between definitional and encyclopaedic information. There is brief coverage of the debate between the generative semanticists, for whom meaning is the basic level of linguistic representation, and those promoting an interpretive semantics, in which semantic processes apply to syntactic structures. Unlike other histories of this period in linguistics, Geeraerts eschews discussion of the personalities and interpersonal events involved and sticks to the ways in which the ideas of this period shaped formal and computational linguistics (each treated briefly in this chapter) and the two families of approaches in the following chapters.

This takes us to the chapter whose remit is probably the most controversial aspect of the book. ‘Neostructuralist semantics’ (Chapter 4) serves as Geeraerts' cover term for contemporary approaches that are not ‘Cognitive semantics’ (Chapter 5), including:

1. (a) Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka Reference Wierzbicka1972, Reference Wierzbicka1996; Goddard Reference Goddard1998)

2. (b) Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff Reference Jackendoff1983, Reference Jackendoff1990)

3. (c) Two-Level Semantics (Bierwisch Reference Bierwisch, Bierwisch and Lang1983, Reference Bierwisch, Bierwisch and Lang1989)

4. (d) the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky Reference Pustejovsky1995)

5. (e) Meaning–Text Theory (Mel'čuk Reference Mel'čuk, Clas and Polguère1970, Mel'čuk, Clas & Polguère 1995)

6. (f) the WordNet project (Fellbaum Reference Fellbaum1998)

7. (g) distributional corpus analysis, particularly as developed in the UK by John Sinclair and colleagues (e.g. Sinclair Reference Sinclair1996)

These are conceived as developments of the structuralist outlook in that (a)–(d) employ semantic components and (e)–(g) involve networks of relations among words. The division between these is seen in terms of how the theorists situate themselves in relation to the generativist semantic legacy: (a)–(d) inherit the generativist attention to the relation between language and cognition, while (e)–(g) are more aligned with computational linguistics. Geeraerts concedes that (b)–(d) might instead be considered ‘neogenerativist’, while the others have more direct roots in structuralism, and that ‘none of the theories brought together in this chapter would be likely to present themselves under the heading “neostructuralist”’ (126). Geeraerts gives a scant 57 pages to these often very different theoretical outlooks. In so few pages, the author must focus on the main philosophical and architectural distinctions among these, and it could be argued that he does not succeed in demonstrating the extent of their engagement with lexical matters, especially for the ‘neogenerativist’ theories. The resulting chapter gives a clear overview of the major theoretical perspectives, but also demonstrates the author's bias toward cognitive semantics.

This leads us to chapter 5, ‘Cognitive semantics’, which devotes 90 pages to a group of theoretical approaches which, by comparison to the ‘neostructuralist’ ones, are very similar in outlook. The ‘Further sources’ section is about twice as long as other chapters. The chapter includes details of all the major phenomena associated with the ‘cognitive’ label, including prototypicality, polysemy, the basic level, metaphor, metonymy, and semantic change, and of major and competing theoretical apparatuses, such as radial categories, domain matrices, mental spaces, conceptual blending, and idealized cognitive models. As in the other chapters, the organization and explanation are clear and erudite. Geeraerts attends to the theory-internal weaknesses as well as the strengths of the theoretical views that he describes. What is strange, given the previous chapter, is that depth of description of ‘classic’ cognitive linguistic phenomena may be seen as forcing a narrower view of cognitive linguistics than ‘neostructuralist’ semantics got. Geeraerts defends devoting more space to cognitive semantics than to other contemporary approaches in that ‘in sheer numbers of people involved and publications produced, cognitive semantics is arguably the most popular framework for the study of lexical meaning in contemporary linguistics’ (183). I was not entirely convinced by this argument, as the chapter's length was arguably more to do with its depth than its breadth of coverage. In particular, it was strange not to find Leonard Talmy's name in the chapter or the book.

The book's ‘Conclusion’ summarizes the development of lexical semantics from 1830 to present. Geeraerts presents the current ‘neostructuralist’ semantics as developing from structuralist and generativist semantics, whereas cognitive semantics is seen as a merging of historical–philological and generativist semantics (of course, not abandoning some aspects of structuralism that were carried into the generativist period, as, for example, attention to the synchronic). The chapter focuses on the tension between onomasiology and semasiology, but in this discussion Geeraerts again gives short shrift to the ‘neostructuralist’ approaches, thus giving the indirect message that cognitive semantics is the pinnacle of semantic theorizing, and therefore its place in the development of the field is the most important.

In general, Geeraerts tries to present the views that he disagrees with in an objective tone, but some of the word choices betray his outlook. Since Geeraerts himself acknowledges that some level of theoretical bias is pretty much unavoidable in such a book, the ways in which the bias is found are interesting to consider, but they do not diminish the overall usefulness of the book for almost anyone needing an overview of this kind.

This book will be of especial value to the Anglophone readership for whom the original French and German texts of the philological and structuralist periods are (depressingly and increasingly) inaccessible. Geeraerts notes that this has led to some ideas being ‘reinvented rather than rediscovered’ (1) in the non-linear development of the field. I plan to assign it to postgraduate students at the outset of their research, as their initiation to the traditions of the field, and expect it to speed up the process by which students discover what they themselves think through exposure to kindred and incompatible thinkers. (It might also help to avoid some wheel-reinventing.) Despite my caveats, I congratulate Geeraerts and thank him for this book.