A Dynamic Research Into Narrowing And Broadening Of Word Meaning In English And Chinese Within The Relevance-Adaptation Framework

Lexicon is a close-linking point in language and life. But owing to the restriction of language system and geographic and cultural backgrounds, lexicon not only has its own lexical meaning but also conveys its particular pragmatic meaning in particular context endowed by pragmatic elements. Philosophy, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics have given different explanations on this linguistic phenomenon, but there lacks a systematic and comprehensive study. Thus, this thesis aims to conduct a tentative research on the interpretation mechanism of narrowing and broadening of word meaning in English and Chinese in the realm of lexical pragmatics and dedicates to summarize the salient features of ad hoc concept.Lexical pragmatics is mainly devoted to the investigation of the interpretation, constitution and change of lexical meaning both in the diachronic and synchronic contexts. Based on the fact that there is much incompleteness or inconsistence between the surface representation of lexical item and their communicated information, the present study is to explore the contextual instantaneousness and the construction mechanism of pragmatic information of lexical items, especially the construction process of ad hoc concept and its unique features.The integrated theoretical model----Relevance-Adaptation Model adopted in this thesis has remedied the descriptive deficiencies of Relevance Model and interpretative deficiencies of Adaptation model respectively, attempting to interpret the utterance from the utter and the interpreter together. And the updated Relevance-Adaptation Model stipulates that adapting to the linguistic context, situational context and background context, the utter is oriented by relevance to produce the utterance. Meanwhile, the interpreter is driven by the search for optimal relevance to construct the ad hoc context to make the pragmatic inference in the process of narrowing and broadening, thus producing the ad hoc concepts, which are rightly the implicatures of the utter.Thus, within this theoretical framework, the present research probes into the interpretation process and mechanism in dynamic context through the illustration of some representative examples from English and Chinese. The analysis shows that the comprehension procedure goes like this:under the restriction of relevant expectation, people tend to build the ad hoc context with the help of information available and choose the particular understanding based on the pragmatic triggers. Thus, through narrowing and broadening of word meaning, they construct the ad hoc concept, grasp the implicatures of the utter and achieve the adaptation balance between the utter and the interpreter in the strategy-choosing part. The salient features of ad hoc concepts and similarities and differences in lexical adjustment between English and Chinese display some enlightening implications for language teaching and language acquisition. What's more, the analysis of this linguistic phenomenon can serve as an active role in people's understanding of the politics, economy, culture and society.