On Pragmatic Enrichment Of Chinese And English Polysemy From The Perspective Of Lexical Pragmatics

Polysemy as a common linguistic phenomenon nowadays has been a hot topic in linguistic research and has also attracted much attention of linguists. The word "polysemy" was first proposed by Blair in1960s which means a word has two or more senses that are related to each other. Most linguists of the previous studies mainly focus on the internal structure and the development model. For example, structural semanticists are confined to the internal structure, without considering the underlying cognitive mechanism. While prototypical semanticists study the polysemy from the cognitive perspective and regard the prototype as its main object, which is fixed in most of the time. Therefore, the previous studies of polysemy don’t consider the context and some other cognitive factors. That’s why they can’t explain the phenomenon of pragmatic enrichment of polysemy.Lexical pragmatics is a new branch of pragmatics and develops rapidly in these years. It involves semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics and so on, and it mainly focuses on the process by which the word meanings in utterance are modified in use. Lexical pragmatics which is based on the conversational implicature theory and the relevance theory combines with contextual and encyclopedic knowledge to study the word meaning dynamically. For example, in certain context, the understanding of polysemy needs pragmatic narrowing or pragmatic broadening of the encoded meaning. That’s the main topic of the paper.This paper mainly focuses on the study of pragmatic enrichment of Chinese and English polysemy from the perspective of lexical pragmatics. Pragmatic enrichment of polysemy refers to the pragmatic inference process of the polysemous word meaning in certain context, which includes pragmatic broadening and pragmatic narrowing. Pragmatic broadening refers to the polysemous word which is used to a more general sense than the encoded meaning in certain context and pragmatic narrowing refers to the polysemous word which is used to convey a more specific sense than the encoded meaning in certain context. This paper contains five parts. The first chapter is the introduction including the purposes of the study, the significance of the study, research methodology and data collection, and then it briefly introduces lexical pragmatics. Chapter Two is the literature review. It talks about the definition of polysemy and the processes causing polysemy, and then reviews the previous study on polysemy such as structural semantics on polysemy and cognitive approach to polysemy. Finally, some drawbacks or limitations of previous study on polysemy are pointed out. Chapter Three mainly analyzes the pragmatic enrichment of polysemy. In this part, fifty examples including Chinese and English are provided to analyze the phenomenon of pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening. Chapter Four involves the interpretation of pragmatic enrichment on polysemy under the framework of relevance theory. From the perspective of relevance, it explores the process of pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening, so that it makes a systematic and comprehensive analysis of pragmatic enrichment. Chapter five is the conclusion. It makes a conclusion of the dissertation and points out major findings and its limitations and gives suggestions for further studies.