Michael Fortescue is Professor of General Linguistics in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

This is an engaging study of the mental lexicon: the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. Fortescue attempts to narrow the gap between the results of experimental neurology and the concerns of theoretical linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. The prime goal as regards linguistic theory is to show how matters of lexical organization can be analysed and discussed within a neurologically informed framework that is both adaptable and constrained.

It combines the perspectives of distributed network modelling and linguistic semantics, and draws upon the accruing evidence from neuroimaging studies as regards the cortical regions involved. It engages with a number of controversial current issues in both disciplines. This text is intended as a tool for linguists interested in psychological adequacy and the latest advances in Cognitive Science.  It provides a principled means of distinguishing those semantic features required by a mental lexicon that have a direct bearing on grammar from those that do not.  A Neural Network Model of Lexical Organisation is essential reading for researchers in neurolinguistics and lexical semantics.

Part 1: The Basics
1. Introduction
1.1 The mental lexicon
1.2 The nature of the model
2. Some sample word templates
2.1 A noun template
2.2 Nouns versus verbs
2.3 Other parts of speech
2.4 A "derived" word    
3. The production and comprehension of simple sentences
4. Expansion to a complex sentence
4.1 Some new word types
4.2 Production of a complex sentence - and an inference
5. Further dimensions of the model
5.1 Relating event structures
5.2 Nominalizations and abstract nouns
5.3 Some loose ends
Summary of Part 1
Part 2: Applications
6. Semantic fields and lexical categories
7. Compositionality
7.1 Nominal composition
7.2 Verbal decomposition
7.3 More on causal derivation
7.4 Complex word meaning: a test case for compositionality
8. Constructions
9. Polysemy
9.1 Polysemy and context
9.2 An excursion into metaphor and metonymy
10. Some further questions of qualia
11. Extensions to languages of different morphological type
Summary of Part 2
Part 3: Cognitive Justification of the Model
12. The interfacing of grammar and lexicon
12.1 Grammar templates
12.2 The realization of grammatical and semantic features by call trees
12.3 How call trees and combination matrixes might function
13. The neural representation of context
14. Acquisition
15. Prospective conclusions
15.1 The justification for separating affordance levels 
15.2 Potential (dis)confirmation of the model
Appendix 1: The relationship to Burnod's neurological model
Appendix 2: Paradigmatic features of English words
Appendix 3: Sample derivations
List of templates
Graphic conventions as first introduced
References
Index