The meaning and interpretation of the Dutch particle wel

Wel is one of the most frequently used particles in the Dutch language, yet it has never been thoroughly analyzed. The literature available about it describes the use of the particle in very specific environments. In this paper I will give a more unitary account of wel as it is used in contemporary Dutch. Furthermore, I will address the question of how, despite the variety in meaning, the interpretation of wel causes no problems most of the time. By means of the Spoken Dutch Corpus I examined a large amount of utterances containing the particle wel. I grouped those occurrences together that seemed to have the same effect on the meaning of the sentence. Furthermore I examined what property those different uses of wel share. I came to the conclusion that they are all a response to a negation in the context. Dependent on that nature, a hierarchy exists in the interpretation of wel. I argue that due to two conflicting constraints in Optimality Theory, wel is interpreted with the strongest meaning that is compatible with the context.