A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Lexical-pragmatic Enrichment Resolution Of The Adjective In English News Headlines

As one of the branches of pragmatics, the lexical pragmatics has been studied in recently years. The lexical pragmatics concerns with the pragmatic enrichment of the lexicon. The scholars aboard and at home investigated the lexical pragmatics from different perspectives. However, the lexicon in English news headlines is less studied in previous researches, and the lexical-pragmatic enrichment plays an important role in discourse analysis. Based on the above reasons, the present thesis tries to testify the accessibility of the lexical-pragmatic enrichment in English news headlines, and to study the features and cognitive mechanism of the lexical-pragmatic enrichment in English news headlines from the perspective of pragmatics and cognition.The lexical-pragmatic enrichment in English news headlines in the present thesis is proposed on the grounds of the Relevance Theory, by reference to Coresense and Consense put forward by Kecskes in his dynamic model of meaning (DMM). The study emphasizes the contextual factors in that both the Relevance Theory and the DMM pay attention to the context. The thesis assumes that the lexical-pragmatic enrichment is a process of the association of cognitive entities. In this process, the relevance of the cognitive entities confirms the inherent consistency between the lexicon and the pragmatic trigger. In the thesis, the cognitive mechanism changes with the contextual variation. In the current cognitive context, the interpretation of the optimal candidate relies on the accessibility of contextual assumptions. Within the framework of the Relevance Theory, the contextual assumption best compatible with the concept can be taken as the referent of the optimal candidate, which thus becomes the optimal context in the process of the interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of the lexicon.The present thesis collects instances of the English news headline from The New York Times and The Economist. By reference to the Relevance Theory, the thesis analyzed the lexicon from four aspects and found that: in English news headlines, the frequency of gradable adjectives is the highest; on the other hand, during the process of the lexical-pragmatic enrichment, the degree of relevance in news headlines with news leads or subtitles is higher than those without leads or subtitles. Those findings will have significance in further study on lexical-pragmatic enrichment and English news headlines.The proposed lexical-pragmatic resolution process is applied on the grounds of statistic results. It is found that: the concept of Coresense and Consense is a method to differentiate the degree of relevance, and this difference cannot affect the execution of cognitive mechanism to lexical-pragmatic enrichment, which means lexicon instances in Coresense and Consense relation share the same resolution process. In Coresense, the encyclopedic knowledge and Coresense together ensure the prototype of the lexicon and its enriched meaning, and it is a comparatively stable, context-free relation, while in Consense, the relevance relies on the current context and the reader's inferential capability, and the relevance between the prototype of the lexicon and its enriched meaning is short-term and based on the specific context.