ABSTRACT
Approaching pragmatics as the study of hearer determined meaning and setting out from the position that even in the simplest of utterances the interpretation of lexical items in conceptual terms is utterance-dependent, this chapter discusses the relatively new field of lexical pragmatics. The chapter discusses narrowing and broadening and shows how far neo-Gricean and especially relevance theoretic pragmatics has advanced our understanding of lexical pragmatics since Grice first drew attention to the default inferences associated with a small set of lexical items in his discussion of conventional implicature. Specifically, the chapter discusses a wide range of examples and real-life contexts illustrating the crucial role of ‘ad hoc’ concept formation in language understanding. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limited nature of lexical entries in dictionaries.
