Lexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use

“The book is interesting in many respects. It challenges traditional approaches to lexical meaning and tries to give coherentexplanations of how speakers understand meanings of words in utterances.”

“Feller’s monograph proves to be invaluable in pointing to the fact that the lexical potential to express a predicative function ‘‘is independent of the communicative function on the utterance level’’ (p. 168). The results of his investigations undoubtedly should be stimulating for research in lexical pragmatics, and concerning its practical application, in lexicography as well as in language pedagogy. Feller’s study demonstrates the potential of integrating the lexicalist approach to the analysis of textual cohesion and coherence with Weigand’s discourse based, procedural theory of speech act analysis, which relies on the textual utilization of encyclopedic information and schematic, conceptually valid knowledge. I believe that through such an integration we will be able to gain a new, pragmatically relevant basis for understanding the textual coding as well as the decoding of contextual types of information.”