| Communication is a process of information exchange or intention expression with the aim of sharing our feelings or maintaining our relationship with others. As we all know, this process always works in some setting named as context, which is the important element for utterance understanding nobody can leave out.The author attempts to analyze the influence played by context on lexicon, one level of linguistic system, with the application of relevance theory. After observing the natural conversations, collecting and studying large amount of writing materials, the author makes the conclusion that the word meaning in utterance can be divided into two kinds: explicature and implicature. The former one refers to the word meaning which identifies with the speaker's real intention, and is very easy to achieve by working out the word's literally encoded meaning. And context plays its role on narrowing the word semantic representation such as selection, restriction, disambiguation, reference assignment and so on to yield its explicature. Implicature, on the contrary, needs the hearer greater efforts to make it out because it is often beyond word's literal meaning or even opposite to its original one for speaker's indirect expression in certain setting. Context, in this case, will be recognized as the crucial clue to guide the hearer to percept the implicature, the word broadened meaning accordingly in the way of adding temporary meaning, social-cultural meaning or rhetorical meaning and so on. All of the examples demonstrate a fact that contextual information is the key factor to determine the degree of word narrowing or broadening. With the psychological activity of inference, the hearer is possible to get contextual effect and as a result, to yield satisfactory optimal relevance of communication.The author hopes that this research will be helpful to improve second language teaching especially the lexical teaching and cultural knowledge importing in order to better students' communicative ability.
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