Review of a BBS target article Lexical Entries and Rules of Language: A Multidisciplinary Study of German Inflection by Harald Clahsen to appear in BBS (1999) 22 (6)

Many authors (e.g., Chomsky 1995, Pinker 1984, and Marcus 1998) argue that the architecture of the language faculty contains two separate components: a (structured) lexicon and a computational component. Clahsen presents in a current BBS target article (in press) new empirical evidences in favour of such a dual-mechanism model of language processing based on a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. In the following review, I will summarise and discuss the major points of Clahsen's paper. My focus will be on theoretical, methodological and empirical issues presented and discussed in the paper. An important issue will be the bearing of his empirical findings on the current debate in psycholinguistic modelling. I will as well speculate that at least a part of Clahsen's reasoning seems not to hold in the case of a language closely related to German, namely Luxembourgian.