The Construction Of Lexical Synonymy In Context: A Lexical Pragmatic Perspective

By exploring the construction of lexical synonymy in context from a lexicalpragmatic perspective, this dissertation proposes a new lexical pragmatic model inexplaining lexical synonymy. The primary purposes of the research are, firstly, toestablish a theoretical framework for lexical synonymy based on the central tenets oflexical pragmatics and relevance theory. Secondly, to demonstrate quantitativelythrough two cognitive psychological experiments (i.e. a synonym generation test andsimilarity judgment experiment) that synonymy is occasion-specific pragmaticrelation and is constructed through pragmatic inferential processes based on ad hoccategories. And lastly, to analyze the property, cognitive basis, cognitive mechanismand the role of ad hoc categories on the basis of experiment data and examples, and toestablish a new theoretical model for lexical synonymy.This dissertation argues that linguistic underdeterminacy is the essentialcognitive basis to synonyms, and proposes that lexical synonymy should beconsidered as a kind of pragmatic relation that is constructed online and derivedthrough constructing ad hoc categories by pragmatic inferential mechanism. Thetheoretical construct is supplemented with two cognitive psychological experiments.Altogether127university undergraduates of English participated in the experiments.The first experiment designed as a synonym generation task aims at testing the degreeof within-subject consistency of synonyms generated in null context and sententialcontext conditions.20commonly-used Chinese nouns and adjectives were chosen asexperiment words, together with100sentences randomly selected from differentgenres of CCL (Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU) corpus as their sententialcontexts.The second experiment also contains null context and context conditions, butmore factors were added through controlling two different types of contextsimultaneously presented to the subjects before lexical pairs. It is designed to examinethe influences of the factors such as context, category type, and the interactionbetween context and category type on the similarity between these lexical pairs. Thematerials are composed of20common and ad hoc category names, with one lexical pair chosen from each category. Different groups of subjects were asked to makesimilarity judgments to the pairs which appear alone and within the context ofcategory names.For the first experiement, the results of the matching score and the correlationbetween matching score and frequency of words indicate that lexical synonymy ishighly dependent on sentential context, and should be accounted as extemporaneouspragmatic relation rather than pre-stored semantic relation. For the second experiment,the results of multi-factor ANOVA show that the presence of ad hoc category nameswould significantly increase the similarity between lexical pairs. This has supportedthe pragmatic inferential view, which holds that lexical synonymy is not semanticallyassociated process, but pragmatically inferred in relevant context. Another implicationis that the ad hoc category plays an important role in this construction process bycontributing to greater accessibility of potentially relevant information. The resultscan be summarized as follows:1. Lexical synonyms perform characteristics of non-specificity, such as non-specified structures, spontaneity and neglectance of irrelevant contents, inparticular communicative situations.2. The cognitive premise and basis of the construction of lexical synonymy islinguistic underdeterminacy.3. Lexical synonymy is regarded as a kind of relationship between differentlexical forms, which is dynamically interpreted as conceptual resemblance inparticular context. It is constructed through pragmatic inferential mechanismby building up ad hoc categories.The contributions of the present research are: firstly, it broadens the reseach inlexical pragmatics by providing a new pragmatic and cognitive perspective, especiallyin terms of its effectivenss in explaining both context-sensitivity and dynamicconstruction process of lexical synonymy. Secondly, this thesis establishes a new lexicalpragmatic model in explaining lexical synonymy, which reveals the dynamic property,cognitive basis and cognitive mechanism of lexical synonymy. This new modelproposes nine concrete steps to explain the comprehension procedure of lexicalsynonymy. Meanwhile, it proposes that the more the conceptual representation of alexical item approximates the prototype of ad hoc category, the more it would be considered as an appropiate synonym to the current context and communicativeintention.The research methodology adopted in this dissertation to testify pragmatic theoryon a cognitive psychological experimental basis might be replicable in future studiesof other lexical relations, like the dynamiticity of antonymy and the rising of extralexical senses of polysemy, etc. The findings of the current research may be alsoapplicable to further investigations on the indeterminacy of translation in terms of theexplanation of lexical synonymy from lexical pragmatic perspective.