Lexical pragmatic study of narrowing in children’s interpretation : relevance theoretic approach

This contribution studies lexical narrowing in children’s interpretation of modified words where by the communicate meaning vary from their linguistically encoded meaning. According to Wilson and Kolaiti (2017), adults and children can understand the meaning of new and unfamiliar words in contexts. The study, then, aims to identify the role of lexical narrowing in children’s interpretation of linguistic phenomena as lexical cloning, polysemy, auto-hyponymy and narrowing the adjective in adjective-noun combination which present a challenge to lexical semantics. The study employs relevance theoretic approach to lexical narrowing to account for children’s interpretation of certain extracts taken from selected English children’s short stories. Based on the data of analysis, it is found that lexical narrowing plays a significant role in the interpretation of these phenomena relying on certain contextual elements that guide children’s interpretation.