Collocational Deviations: A Relevance Theory Perspective

Language is always considered a system of infinite use of finite resources. In actual language use, however, people for most of the time tend to follow the conventions known as norms. There exist phonetic norms, semantic norms, lexical norms and grammatical norms, upon which our daily language use is based. While too much norm-obeying leads to the anesthetic way of thinking, creative language use including collocational deviations brings to people mint fresh perspective of the objective world.This paper proposes and explores the phenomenon of collocational deviations, which is assumed to be the breakage of conventional collocational preferences. Generally, a collocation is defined by researchers as a habitual language construction that holds mutual expectation between lexical items. In a collocational deviation, however, the semantic expectation and habit are broken through lexical range extension. Addressees of this kind have to extend their imaginations a little in interpretation.According to the Relevance theory, communication is an information as well as intention conveying process. In the ostensive-inferential communication process, the collocational deviations are believed to be made more manifest and ready to be processed and perceived as showing the addressors' real intentions and more information in a condensed form, combined with the double contexts brought by collocating items that belong to at least two contexts conventionally. In the modest attempts to describe collocational deviations in terms of semantic relationship, this paper proposes a division of three types: collocational deviations overlapping with figure of speech, modified idiomatic collocations and collocations with unfavorable semantic prosody.The first chapter of this paper is devoted to introducing this research. The second chapter reviews the literature of collocations and unusual collocations, and concludes a working definition of collocations and the use of collocational deviation. The third chapter introduces the data source of the present research and theoreticalconsiderations of collocational deviations. Chapter four discusses the mechanism of collocational deviations and finds out their relationship with figure of speech and semantic prosody. Some examples are cited in the fifth chapter to show that collocational deviations have extra communicative effects in the three categories mentioned. Chapter six concludes and discusses limitations of this research.Due to the disadvantage that the author is studying English and its culture in a foreign country, and the difficulty in fully describing a language phenomenon, this paper must bear some flaws that call for criticism and further exploration.