An Adaptation-relevance Approach To Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment

In verbal communication, language users often make pragmatic processing toward word meaning based on context. This causes the pragmatic enrichment, including narrowing and broadening, of the dictionary meaning or prototypical meaning of the word. Since the birth of lexical pragmatics in 1990s, lexical pragmatic enrichment has become a well-studied example of it. Relevance theory has managed to make a unitary approach of lexical pragmatics which sees lexical pragmatic enrichment as a pragmatic inference process of searching for optimal relevance. However, it has been pointed out that relevance theory has its weakness in descriptive power. Adaptation theory has much implication in this field, but left unemployed; besides, it is insufficient in interpretative power. However, recent years in China, effort has been made in building an adaptation-relevance approach in which the two theories complete each other.Since the reliability of the existing framework of lexical pragmatics is affected by the weak points of relevance theory, it is necessary to introduce other pragmatic theories to build a new theoretic approach and promote the development of this branch of linguistics. This study believes that adaptation-relevance approach, which enables the two theories to complete each other, is of theoretic methodological significance to lexical pragmatics. Therefore, this study tries to answers three questions:(1) What are the weak points of relevance theory on lexical pragmatic enrichment study? (2) What are the implications of adaptation theory on lexical pragmatic enrichment study? (3) How can lexical pragmatic enrichment be analyzed under the framework of a new adaptation-relevance approach? The findings of the first two questions is the research base of the third. The whole process is as follows. First of all, a systemic analysis of the strong and weak points of the two theories has been done. Secondly, a new tentative adaptation-relevance approach for lexical pragmatic enrichment has been made. Finally, based on the approach, the working mechanism of different varieties of lexical pragmatic narrowing and broadening are illustrated by some English and Chinese sentences. Through the research, the author has found:(1) Relevance theory neither clearly defines "expectation of relevance" nor explains how this expectation reaches word level, so relevance approach can not answer "what triggers the lexical adjustment process", which is one of the basic questions of lexical pragmatics; the basic framework of relevance theory, which is based on expectation of relevance, cognitive effect and processing effort, runs into a meaningless circular argument and makes the so-called "mutual adjustment of explicatures, contextual assumptions and implications (or implicatures)" impractical, so relevance approach fails to explain "how does the adjustment process work in detail". Therefore the existing relevance approach of lexical pragmatics is unreliable. (2) Adaptation theory sheds new light on lexical pragmatics in terms of making linguistic choices and adaptation, i.e. lexical pragmatic enrichment is a matter of making linguistic choices on word level, and making adaptation to the context in a dynamic way with different degree of salience, both in its production and comprehension. (3) Under the framework of adaptation-relevance approach, lexical pragmatic enrichment is a process of choice-making and dynamic context-adapting based on expectation of relevance. Meanwhile, this study uses some figures to schematically show the working mechanism of different varieties of narrowing and broadening. Additionally, the implications, limitations of the study and suggestions for follow-up study have also been discussed.