The Hearer's Understanding Of The Speech Act Of Evaluation

Lexical pragmatics, a new concept in the study of language, emerged in the late 20th century, and it is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics, particularly pragmatics. Its current concerns include such phenomena as blocking, pragmatic anomaly and lexical specification. It investigates the process by which linguistically specified ('literal') word meanings are modified in use, which concerns the interface study among pragmatics, semantics (esp. cognitive semantics), lexicon and cognitive linguistics. It includes the information construction of pragmatic narrowing and broadening of word meaning, esp. the pragmatic dealing with certain lexis in utterance understanding. What themes lexical pragmatics concerns goes beyond the scope of traditional lexical semantics that emphasizes the static semantic feature, semantic relationship and ignores the communicative meanings of certain lexis. Compared with the weak points of lexical semantics, lexical pragmatics is attributed to the multidimensional study of lexis covering social and cognitive perspectives. It puts emphasis on the lexis similar to pragmatic triggers in communication. As a subdivision of pragmatics, lexical pragmatics aims at giving a systematic account of the semantic under-specification of words or expressions. Their linguistically encoded or prototypical meanings are found inadequate in utterance interpretation, thus such meanings need to be narrowed in a more restricted sense or broadened approximately as well as metaphorically in a more general sense until their optimal relevance is satisfied in context.This dissertation is attributed to the field of lexical pragmatics. The hearer's understanding of the speech act of evaluation is analyzed by means of relevance theory. I want to find whether there is the broadening inference or not in the hearer's understanding of evaluation. If there is, why does this phenomenon occur? How does the inferential process of the hearer work? Is the broadening inference connected with the conventional use or generalized meaning of certain lexis? Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure will be utilized to demonstrate the hearer's understanding of evaluation. Simultaneously, contextual effect, dynamic context and optimal relevance will be taken into consideration.