Every now and again I receive a lengthy manuscript from a kind of theoretician known to psychiatrists as the "triangle people" - kooks who have independently discovered that everything in the universe comes in threes (solid, liquid, gas; protons, neutrons, electrons; the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost; Moe, Larry, Curly; and so on). At the risk of sounding like a triangle person, let me explain why I think that the topic of this volume - - storage and computation in the language fac ulty - though having just two sides rather than three, is the key to understanding every interesting issue in the study of language. I will begin with the fundamental scientific problem in linguistics: explaining the vast expressive power of language. What is the trick behind our ability to filleach others' heads with so many different ideas? I submit there is not one trick but two, and they have been emphasized by different thinkers throughout the history of linguistics.

Contributing authors. Preface. Acknowledgment. 1. Minimising or maximising storage? An introduction. S. Nooteboom, et al. Part I: Setting the stage. 2. What''s in the lexicon? R. Jackendoff. Part II: Accessing regular and irregular word forms. 3. Dutch inflection: The rules that prove the exception. H. Baayen, et al. 4. Words, rules and stems in the Italian mental lexicon. T. Say, H. Clahsen. Part III: Changing the rules. 5. The balance between storage and computation in phonology. G. Booij. 6. Computation and storage in language contact; P. Muysken. Part IV: Pronouncing spoken words. 7. Storage and computation in spoken word production. A. Roelofs. Part V: Buffering and computing. 8. Effects of short-term storage in processing rightward movement; P. Ackema, A. Neeleman. 9. Storage and computation in sentence processing. A neuroimaging perspective. E. Kaan, L. Stowe. Part VI: Computing and storing aspects of discourse. 10. Computation and storage in discourse interpretation. N. Asher. Subject Index. Author Index.

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