A Lexico-pragmatic Study Of Nonce Meaning In English Words

In the process of language expression,when the existing lexical meaning cannot meet the needs of the speaker,the speaker will create a nonce meaning based on the context to fill the vacancy of the current lexical meaning.The emergence of nonce meaning affects people’s understanding of discourse to a certain extent.Accurate inference of nonce meaning is the primary prerequisite for successful communication.The understanding of nonce meaning requires the listener to combine encyclopedic knowledge with cognitive reasoning ability in a specific communicative context to correctly know its meaning.Thus,once out of the specific context,the nonce meaning is uncertain.Lexical pragmatics focuses on the pragmatic processing of uncertain meanings in language use.Therefore,lexical pragmatics can provide a perspective for the study of nonce meaning.The thesis studies the nonce meaning in English from the perspective of lexical pragmatics.In the process of analysis,qualitative analysis is used.The thesis selects the Contemporary College English(Second Edition)textbooks published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and the reading comprehension part of the Test for English Majors-Band 8 from 2010 to 2022 as corpus and selects appropriate examples to demonstrate the viewpoints in the thesis.There are three research questions in the thesis:(1)What are the pragmatic characteristics of nonce meaning?(2)What are the pragmatic processes of nonce meaning?(3)What are the functions of nonce meaning?Through research,it is concluded that the nonce meaning has six pragmatic characteristics: ad hocness,contextuality,dynamicness,calculability,creativeness,and economy.In the process of creating and inferring the nonce meaning,speakers and listeners need to enrich the literal meaning to varying degrees,namely,pragmatic narrowing,pragmatic broadening,and pragmatic shifting.Nonce meaning has textual and pragmatic functions.As a significant part of a sentence,nonce meaning has crucial textual functions of cohesion and coherence.In addition,the nonce meaning also bears the pragmatic functions of exaggeration,irony,humor,and conciseness.Finally,the thesis discusses the implications of studying the nonce meaning for English as a Foreign Language teaching and learning and puts forward some suggestions for teachers and students on how to teach and learn the nonce meaning.The thesis only makes a preliminary exploration of the nonce meaning,hoping that more scholars will participate in the research team of the nonce meaning.