Interpreting The Pragmatic Meanings Of Words In Utterances

It is undeniable that words have "meanings" that go above and beyond the scope of linguistic research. This paper proposes that the meanings of words a speaker intends in an utterance be pragmatically enriched by relevance-driven inferential mechanisms, which take what is linguistically encoded as a guide in inferring speaker's meaning.Although, explicitly or implicitly, current pragmatic approaches agree that the interpretation of words in utterance is dependent on the recognition of the speaker's intentions, very little has been said about the nature and characteristics of pragmatic meaning of words in utterances and the pragmatic processes that regulate the occurrence and interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of English words in utterance. This research provides a theoretically adequate and cognitively plausible pragmatic approach to words interpretation in utterance. This research just aims to fill this gap, which provides a theoretically adequate and cognitively plausible pragmatic approach to words interpretation in utterance. This thesis suggests that the abstract semantic decoded natures of words in utterance are (in many instances, at least) not really full-fledged concepts, but rather concept schemas, or pointers to aconceptual space, on the basis of which, on every occasion of their use, an actual concept (an ingredient of a thought) is pragmatically inferred. This actual concept of words in utterance, whether resulting in a narrower or broader lexical concept or some combination of the two, is just the pragmatic meaning of words in utterance. This paper gives detailed analysis of its definition, its characteristics and its relation between the conventional meanings of words. In order to regulate the occurrence and the interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of words in utterance, based on Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, this paper argues the hypothesis that both the idea that our minds are flexible enough to construct far many more concepts than our languages can linguistically encode (see Barsalou 1983, 1987, 1993) and the idea that the relevance-driven inferential mechanisms are powerful enough to construct the concept intended on the basis of the encoded concept and the context in which it is processed (Sperber &Wilson, 1998b). The depth, to which the encoded concepts are processed, in arriving at the pragmatic meaning the speaker intends as a component of the explicature of her utterance, and the effort invested are constrained at every stage by the search for an optimally relevant interpretation of utterance in communication.This thesis has proved that both literal and non-literal interpretations of words in utterances are context dependent and pragmatically constructed via relevance-driven inferential mechanisms, which take what is linguistically, encoded (the logical form and its constituent concepts) as merely a guide in inferring speaker's meaning. Therefore we can easily recognize the importance of this relevance-driven inferential mechanism in interpreting the pragmatic meanings of words in utterances is that it helps us to improve our appreciation in reading, to make our expression more proper, concise, novel, ironic and humorous in writing, and most important of all it helps us to give more potential for present words and enrich our language in our communication.