Cognitive And Pragmatic Analysis On The Deviation Of Lexical Meaning

Up to now, there have been many approaches to analyze lexical meaning in the linguistic community. They vary from the traditional Aristotle's binary conception of meaning, the dynamic pragmatic conception of meaning, to the cognitive conception of meaning. As Chairman Mao's saying goes,"Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend."The paper takes fengzi for example. It is a practical research based on the modern Chinese corpus of PKU. Firstly, the author will look back to its lexical derivation and semantic change from a diachronic perspective. We find that with regard to fengzi, whatever in literature works or in the society, people criticize more but praise less. When mentioning fengzi, modern people may sniff at them or worship them. It is just this sort of fengzi that goes through the medical term in traditional Chinese medicine, the analyzed object in psychology, and the vivid character prototypes in literature. And its connotations and meanings have been constantly changing ever since. Along with social changes, its derived craziness conception becomes a kind of means for self-protecting, a kind of instrument for unleashing one's disgruntled emotion, etc. and then eventually becomes the object people show great interest in.Then, from a synchronic perspective, the author tries to use the fruits of CBT to analyze the blending mechanism of"N+fengzi". In fact, during the process of analyzing lexical meaning, we discover that lexical units in use do not only have conventional lexical meanings, but many pragmatic elements influencing their interpretation. Next, on the level of utterance, the author emphasizes on the generation and deviation of dynamic pragmatic meaning under the guidance of BP. In the end, we form a new theoretical model of"CBT+CSP+BP"in order to give a better demonstration on the deviation of lexical meaning in language.