Pragmatic Adjustment Of Word Meaning In Utterance Understanding

This dissertation is a lexico-pragmatic study conducted within the framework of Relevance Theory, focusing on how the addressee makes a pragmatic adjustment of linguistically-specified word meaning in utterance understanding, and aiming to give a unified and plausible account of lexico-pragmatic processes, to improve the existing relevance-theoretic account of them, and to find out whether lexico-pragmatic processes are universal in understanding the utterances in the different languages.We put forward an important pair of notions closely related to word meaning -concept type and concept token, offering a fresh dynamic perspective for lexico-pragmatic research. In this dissertation, we claim that there exist concept types and concept tokens in human thinking. Concept type is an abstraction from a set of entities with similar properties whereas concept token is an instance of concept type. Concept types always exist in the abstract and have the property of stability, but concept tokens exist in the concrete and have the property of variability. The dynamic property of a concept token consists in its being constructed on-line in utterance understanding. In the on-line construction of a concept token, we retrieve the context-independent information associated with its concept type, the context-dependent information activated by the context, the goal-related information activated by the communicative goal, and the experience-related information from long-term memory, and integrate them into the concept token being constructed.We argue that there are four possible outcomes of a lexico-pragmatic process in the construction of concept tokens - zero adjusting, contracting, expanding and conpanding. Zero adjusting is the outcome of the pragmatic process by which a word is used to convey the meaning that is the same as its linguistic meaning. Contracting is the outcome of the pragmatic process by which a word is used to convey a meaning more specific than its linguistic meaning by restricting its linguistically-specified denotation. Expanding is the outcome of the pragmatic process by which a word is used to convey a meaning broader than its linguistic meaning by dropping at least one of the defining properties of the concept type encoded by the word. Conpanding is the outcome of the pragmatic process in...