Book excerpt: This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.