Towards the Optimal Lexicon

Abstract

Defending the structuralist idea that one can only give an appropriate semantics for lexical items when also considering the alternative expressions in their respective semantic field, an optimality-theoretic approach to the lexicon is proposed. Within the framework of lexical pragmatics, where radical underspecification and a contextual meaning variant enrichment mechanism based on conversational implicature are of central interest, phenomena linked to (bidirectional) optimality such as blocking and deblocking are discussed. It is also argued that prototypes or strong candidates in a semantic field may delimit the possible use(s) of an underspecified lexical item.