ABSTRACT A workshop on the structure of the lexicon, with particular emphasis on semantic fields, will be held in the summer of 1989 in Tucson, Arizona, to coincide with the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute. In spite of recent significant research on the lexicon, the global structure of the lexicon -- in particular the notion of semantic fields -- has received relatively little attention. Semantic field theory has been a useful descriptive tool for comparing vocabularies across languages, for analyzing metaphor, and for explaining certain psychological phenomena. The workshop will provide a forum for prominent researchers from various dis- ciplines (linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology) to come together to clarify the concepts and issues, develop new research strategies, and formulate interdisciplinary hypotheses concerning lexical organization. The results of the conference should help to show how semantic field theory and related theories dealing with the structure of the lexicon can provide new and deeper insights into the structure and use of language.
