Lexical Competition: 'Round' in English and Dutch

Abstract

This paper studies the semantic division of labour between. three Dutch words, om, rond and rondom, all three corresponding to the English word (a)round. First the range of senses covered by the English word is described in model-theoretic terms and ordered according to strength. Relating these senses to the three Dutch words shows that they are themselves ordered from weak to strong: om< rond < rondom. This ordering corresponds to a phonological and morphosyntactic ordering, a finding that can be explained by pragmatic principles in a framework that uses bidirectional optimization.