Meaning and the Lexicon brings together 35 years of pathbreaking work on language by Ray Jackendoff. It traces the development of his Parallel Architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative components, and in which knowledge of language consists of a repertoire of stored structures. Some of these structures, such as words and morphemes, are idiosyncratic mappings between phonology, syntax, and meaning; some, such as idioms, attach meaning to larger syntactic structures; other structures are purely syntactic or morphosyntactic; and yet others are pieces of meaning with no syntactic or phonological form. The Parallel Architecture also seeks to explain and understand how language is integrated with human cognition, particularly with vision.