The Study Of Pragmatic Enrichment On Polysemy From Perspective Of Lexical Pragmatics

As an important and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, polysemy hasattracted much attention of linguists working in various branches of linguistics. Differentlinguistic schools study polysemy from different perspectives. Structural semantics confinesthe research on internal structures of polysemy, without taking account of its underlyingcognitive mechanism. While prototypical semantics regards the prototypicality as its mainidea, and gives the explanation from the cognitive approach. The prototype theory treats theprototype of cognitive category as a fixed model, and interprets the polysemy withoutconsideration of context, resulting in the explanation defaults on the choices andunderstanding of polysemy.This paper based on both English and Chinese materials, illustrates the defaults withstructural semantics and prototypical semantics' interpretations on polysemy, trying toaccount for the pragmatic enrichment on polysemy from lexical pragmatics perspective.Lexical pragmatics focuses on the encoded meaning of pragmatic inference from manyperspectives, such as lexicology, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, etc., andincludes the pragmatic narrowing and broadening of lexicon. The choices and understandingof polysemy depend on the pragmatic enrichment, and the prototypical meaning of polysemynarrows or broadens within certain context. On the relevance-theoretical account, the choicesand understanding of polysemy are based on context, and the hearers make cognitive effortsby constructing the optimal relevance in pragmatic inference. The prototypical meanings ofpolysemy are found inadequate in utterance interpretation, thus such meanings need to benarrowed in a more restricted sense or broadened in a more general sense until the optimalrelevance is satisfied in certain context.This paper provides a new approach to the cognitive study on polysemy, and tries toillustrate the choices and understanding of polysemy within the framework of lexicalpragmatics, concluding this issue to be a cognitive-pragmatic issue.