A Study On English Lexicon Localization In Chinese Based On A Semantic-Pragmatic Model Of Polysemy

With the inereasingly strengthened English learning. the contact between English and Chinese becomes extensive and profound. English localization phenomenon is not only limited to the initial loanword, transliteration and free translation, but also follows the derived principles from English polysemous vocabulary in the localization process with new properties in China.Taking hold住as an example, the present study aims to explore the localized process and the semantic-pragmatic model of English polysemy under the framework of the semantic-pragmatic model of the acquisition and use of the polysemy (Dong Yuezhang and Zhang Ren,2010), with the research method of qualitative analysis on the basis of the corpus with samples randomly selected from the Britain National Corpus and the Google.The semantic-pragmatic model of the acquisition and use of polysemy (ibid) argued against the literal-metaphorical standard assumption and indicated that the polysemy involves the non-polysemous conceptual level and polysemous lexical level. Hence the use and acquisition of polysemy consist of the following two processes:1) The psychologically primitive concept in conceptual level is activated by specific domains, hence generates semantic representations with equal status in lexical level,2) The above semantic representations are influenced by the set of pragmatic restrictions that prompt the salient meaning which satisfies most of the restrictions to be the optimal output.The present study verifies one of the conclusions of the above model that the polysemy involves the non-polysemous conceptual level and polysemous lexical level and the salient meaning in lexical level is prompted by the specific context to be the optimal output. However, the study also finds that the concept of the polysemy is extending, which induces the generation of new semantic representations through the process of metaphorization. So, the argument against the literal-metaphorical standard assumption is not fulfilled in the present study.It is concluded that the concept of the polysemy is extending, which makes the lexical level dynamic. In order to seek the relevance to the context, pragmatic process works on the relevance in the following two steps:1) figuring out the salient meanings.2) narrowing or broadening the salient meaning to output. Hence, the acquisition and use of the polysemy should take the following factors into account:1) extension in the conceptual level;2) the generation of new semantic representations in seeking relevance to the context.