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The first English introduction to Gustave Guillaume's theory of language as a mental phenomenon.

Words are the foundation, the building blocks of language. While an obvious and irreplaceable concept in the minds of non-linguists, the entry "word" does not figure in the indexes of some books on linguistics. Why is there this neglect of the word among many contemporary linguists? Inspired by the work of the French linguist Gustave Guillaume and the last in a series of books, The Word and Its Ways in English is a study of the way the word is configured in English, and an attempt to discern its nature. Walter Hirtle presents the word as the smallest element of meaning in the brain. He also...

While the work of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960) has had an important influence on French linguistics, his theory is not well known in the English-speaking world. Lessons on the English Verb provides a comprehensive treatment of the English verbal system within a Guillaumean theoretical framework - an approach unprecedented in its systemic scope. Guillaume's theory of psychomechanics views language as systematic and semiotic, with the use of verb forms governed by the meaning we want to express, which is embedded in the unconscious resources of one's native tongue rather than in rules. Through...

In his exploration of word meaning, Walter Hirtle examines an important and controversial topic in lexical semantics: polysemy, the capacity of words to manifest a range of different meanings when employed in different contexts. Building on the work of French linguist Gustave Guillaume, Making Sense out of Meaning is a speaker-oriented study that describes how speakers form word meaning and not, as in other theories, how listeners interpret the meaning of what they hear. Hirtle develops a general model of the ways in which words and word meaning may be realized in discourse contexts and...

While ordinary speakers - and some linguists - assume we have a mental dictionary stocked with words ready for use, Walter Hirtle shows that this view leads to contradictions. Focusing on the English noun with its modifiers and determiners, he argues that a word's meaning is formed from formative elements each time we use it.