Explorations Of Blocking Phenomena In Lexical Pragmatics

Lexical Pragmatics, as a new branch of linguistics, emerged at the very beginning of the 21th century. Blocking phenomenon is one of the key issues in the study of Lexical Pragmatics in which researchers abroad have shown great interest. Their researches have given birth to a couple of blocking theories which can account for blocking phenomena to some extent, but quite a few problems are still left unsolved. In comparison, few Chinese researchers in the field of pragmatics have ever touched upon blocking phenomena, and thus further investigations are badly needed. Within the framework of Lexical Pragmatics, this paper sets out to study blocking phenomena in language by integrating relevant theories from Morphology, Semantics, Pragmatics, Psychological Linguistics, etc. Adopted in this study are approaches of induction, exemplification and synthetic analysis.A brief review is first made of the appearance of Lexical Pragmatics viewed from its relationship with other disciplines, including the origin and nature of blocking and its close relationship with absolute synonymy. Four types of blocking are then identified with hard evidence such as morphological blocking, blocking between lexical items without the same stem, blocking of paraphrastic expression by lexical item, and partial blocking.In regard to the existing morphological blocking theories in particular, the present study demonstrates their explanatory inadequacies as well as theoretical breakthroughs, highlighting some issues concerning the existing conditions of morphological blocking occurrence, providing some alternative solutions and summarizing the causes of morphological blocking failure. Closely related with morphological blocking, the productivity of an affix is explored from both macro and micro perspectives with the finding that productivity under discussion is simply the result of the interplay of a complex of factors. Compared with morphological blocking, the other three types mentioned above seem to have been ignored by researchers. The present study takes upon itself, therefore, to apply some relevant theories to exposition of them one by one with special attention paid to the causes of the blocking failure of the three types.The present study concludes with the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation brought into full play for insights into the problems unexplained or not fully accounted for so far by earlier blocking theories. When blocking mechanism is seen as indicative of the active adaptability on the part of language users to language system, the study of blocking phenomena will contribute, both theoretically and practically, to lexicology, lexicography and L2 vocabulary teaching and learning.