Determination and Interpretation of Semantic Lexical Underspecification in Old English Homilies (Critical Essay‪)‬

ABSTRACT One of the most challenging problems facing lexical semantics of old texts, like Old English homilies, is to explain how unspecified meanings are "controlled" allowing the proper senses to be selected and deployed to achieve successful goals. The term "underspecification" refers to "some feature value whose overt presence is required on the surface" but "is left underlyingly unspecified and must therefore be provided by a default mechanism" (Trask 1993: 291). The study of lexical underspecification not only sheds light on the semantic behaviour of polysemies by "unpacking" several senses for a single lexical item, it may enable this lexical item to be uniquely understood in the context and it may ultimately help us make suggestions about evolutionary semantic continuity of the word.