The title of the first plenary lecture at the GTD was ‘The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture’. Jackendoff addressed the question ‘What does a language user store in the lexicon, and in what form?’, exploring this question in the context of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff 2002). Within this outlook, lexical items are pieces of phonological, (morpho)syntactic, and semantic structures, and morphology is the grammar of word-sized pieces of structure. This leads to a new perspective on productive patterns: the principles used to build novel structures are simply a subset of the schemas in the lexicon. Connecting the model to larger issues, Jackendoff concluded that we need to reconsider Humboldt’s ‘infinite use of finite means.’
