Summary

The goal of this chapter is to explicate the common ground and shared pursuits of lexical typology and morphology. Bringing those to the fore is beneficial to the scholarship of both disciplines and will allow their methodologies to be combined in more fruitful ways. In fact, such explication also opens up a whole new domain of study. This overview article focuses on a set of important research questions common to both lexical typology and morphology. Specifically, it considers vocabulary structure in human languages, cross-linguistic research on morphological analysis and word formation, and finally inventories of very complex lexical items. After a critical examination of the pertinent literature, some directions for future research are suggested. Some of them include working out methodologies for more systematic exploration of vocabulary structure and further scrutiny of how languages package and distribute semantic material among linguistic units. Finally, more effort is to be devoted to the study of vocabularies where basic concepts are encoded by complex lexical items.