Studies On Broadening And Narrowing Of Word Meaning From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Broadening and narrowing of word meaning have long been a research subject of traditional semantics. However, as the emergence of lexical pragmatics, studies on broadening and narrowing of word meaning have been brought into the scope of pragmatic research. In the framework of lexical pragmatics, Grice's conversational implicature theory, Rosch's prototype theory, Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory have been widely applied in studies of broadening and narrowing of word meaning. But these theories are used separately rather than systematically, only giving explanation from some aspects, such as semantic and cognitive and so on, thus these theories lack a kind of pervasiveness and comprehensiveness.Verschueren's adaptation theory takes pragmatics as a perspective on language, which covers the whole range of social, cultural and cognitive aspects involved in constructing meaning through language use. It claims that language using is a process of making choices, whether consciously or unconsciously; moreover, this choices-making happens as soon as language is used. In the course of communication, factors of both utterer and interpreter's mental world, social world and physical world should be adapted to. Apart from that, language structure, including style, code etc. at macro-level and phoneme and morpheme etc. at micro-level, should also be adapted to. Broadening and narrowing of word meaning are the inevitable results of choice making, and the necessary outcome of adaptation to factors of mental, social and physical worlds. What is more, adaptation to structure is another reason of the occurrence of broadening and narrowing. The processes of broadening and narrowing are dynamic, in which there are various degrees of consciousness.This paper tries to illustrate broadening and narrowing of word meaning from a new perspective, that is, adaptation theory, which bears a strong interpretative power due to its thoughts of perspective and dynamics. Theory is the basis of practice; adaptation theory is likely to have great implications for lexical teaching and acquisition.