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In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of affairs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address the role of words in meaning-construction. My starting point is the observation that the ‘meanings’ associated with words are protean in nature. That is, the semantic values associated with words are flexible, open-ended and highly dependent on the utterance context in which they are embedded. In attempting to provide an account of meaning-construction that coheres with this observation I develop a cognitively-realistic theory of lexical representation and a programmatic theory of lexical concept integration. My fundamental claim is that there is a basic distinction between lexical concepts, and meaning. While lexical concepts constitute the semantic units conventionally associated with linguistic forms, and form an integral part of a language user's individual mental grammar, meaning is a property of situated usage-events, rather than words. That is, meaning is not a function of language per se, but arises from language use. I present an account of lexical concepts and the conceptual knowledge structures, cognitive models, with respect to which they are relativised. I also situate this theory within a usage-based account. I then develop a theory of lexical concept integration which serves to provide an account of how lexical concepts are combined in service of situated meaning-construction. As the constructs lexical concept and cognitive model are central to the theory of lexical representation and meaning-construction I present, I refer to the approach developed here as the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, or LCCM Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more ‘lexical’ of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This ‘lexical’ Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun's interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexeme-formation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not ‘split’, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, and section 4 concludes the argument by hypothesizing that Number not only can, but must have a distinct interpretation as a lexicalized property than as a regular inflectional one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the relationship between (proper) names and word structure, and specifically with the classification of names and with the role of (classes of) names in lexical derivation. The major source of exemplification is English. §1 outlines the categorization of names proposed in a sister study devoted to syntax of names (Anderson in preparation), as well as other relevant parts of the syntactic description given there. In §2.1 different kinds of personal and place names are differentiated and their more salient morphosyntactic characteristics commented upon. This is followed in §2.1 by a consideration both of the historic sources of names and of some of the properties and functions of systems of naming; and there is noted the typical de-semanticisation of names compared with the common words that are their typical historical source, such that the synchronic role of common (descriptive) elements in name systems tends to be restricted. These discussions are relatively informal, but § offers a more (lexical) derivational processes that can form names and with the role of names in derivational processes forming other names or items of other categories, and the light these throw on the semantics of (classes of) names and naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article talks about universal semantic primitives as a basis for lexical semantics. It notes that the semantic system of a language is like a set of Lego blocks, of different shapes and sizes. The meanings of words are like objects constructed out of various Lego blocks. The purpose of lexical semantics is to study such objects, to deconstruct them into their constitutive building blocks, and to seek generalizations about the different types of building blocks and different ways of putting them together. The main difficulty of lexical semantics is that while it needs a solid foundation in the form of well justified semantic primitives, no set of such primitives is given at the outset, rather, the primitives themselves must be found through large-scale lexicographic investigations, both monolingual and cross-linguistic. This double task of finding the primitives via lexicographic description and basing lexicographic description on the primitives may seem self-contradictory and thus impossible to accomplish.

This paper explores how adults acquire a new lexical item, and how they integrate it into their overall lexical knowledge. It suggests that the findings are relevant both to lexical semantics, and 10 studies of the mental lexicon. In particular, the paper examines how the word wimp and its derivatives (mainly wimpish, wimpishness, and wimp out) have become widely-known in British English in a time-span of around ten years. Wimp-usage predated entry into standard dictionaries, so dictionary consultation is unlikely to have played an important role. This paper therefore analyses a corpus of over 500 occurrences of wimp-words from British newspapers 1990–3, mainly from The Times and Sunday Times, on the assumption that word learning can occur from reading. and that newspaper usage overlaps with ‘normal’ usage. It shows that over 80% of wimp-word tokens contain information on their meaning in the immediate surrounding text. This involved one or more of the following: reference to the sex of the wimp (usually male), collocation with a word indicating feebleness (e.g. ‘paihetic wimp’), contrast with a ‘strong’ non-wimp (e.g. ‘From wimps to warriors’), overt negative evaluation (e.g. ‘reviles as a wimp’). covert negative evaluation (e.g. ‘Who needs an enclosed cockpit? Wimps’). Finally, it argues that ‘the wimp effect’ reinforces the idea that a desirable male is one who is a belligerent action-man, and so promotes and sustains cultural stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore lexical processing in an agglutinative language and the organization of the lexicon. From the point of view of lexical processing the major empirical question that arises in relation to agglutinative languages is whether the morphologically complex words are represented in a holistic or a morphologically decomposed form in the mental lexicon and whether lexical access requires some form of morphological parsing of the word. In this article several possible models are being differentiated. These include holistic word entries, separate morphemic entries, and serially specified morphemic entries. It also briefly reports some preliminary results from two pilot studies which bear on the validity of these models. Both experiments examined the lexical processing of morphologically simple and complex Hungarian words using different on-line techniques.