The Structure of The Lexical Item and Sentence Meaning Composition

This chapter examines the full-entry model according to which lexical meaning is a generalization that results from, and is maintained by, continued exposure to a conceptual structure through linguistics means. It focuses on the iteration reading in “durative” for, as in “Sam jumped for an hour,” and the observation that such iteration has no overt morphophonological support, raising the question of its source. Composition of the for-adverbial exerts greater computational load than the non-iterative counterpart. The root of this cost is explained as the real-time search for a partition measure demanded by for’s meaning. Hence, for’s meaning determines the context that is relevant for the utterance construal. In this way, the lexical item built in a full-entry fashion captures the semantic combinatorial and generative burden by capitalizing on a simplified lexically-driven constraint-satisfaction dynamic for the processor and a lexicon-based grammar.