A Study Of Lexical Blocking From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Lexical blocking phenomenon means that the existence of one lexical itemprevents the production or the use of another one. Before the1990s, the studies oflexical blocking were mainly shown abroad in the field of word formation. Blutnerproposed lexical pragmatics in1996and pointed out that lexical blocking is one of themajor research topics of lexical pragmatics. After the proposal of lexical pragmatics,researchers abroad tried to investigate lexical blocking from the perspetive ofpragmatics and brought more blocking types into discussion. On the contrary, veryfew researches of lexical blocking have been done at home. This thesis is on the basisof the summaries of previous blocking studies and the author attempts to analyze andexplore lexical blocking from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.Adaptation Theory was proposed by Verschueren in1999. As a new pragmatictheory, it treats pragmatics as an independent discipline but not a component oflinguistics. Furthermore, it claims that pragmatics is a general functional perspectiveon the whole language and any linguistic phenomenon can be discussed from thepragmatic perspective. Adaptation Theory holds that using language is the process ofmaking linguistic choices continuously and consciously or unconsciously, which isbased on the three properties of language, variability, negotiability and adaptability. Italso provides four investigation angles for pragmatic descriptions and explanations,including contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation process. Due to its potentexplanatory power, Adaptation Theory has been more and more applied to thedescriptions and explorations of linguistic phenomena.The research in this thesis is also a new trial of applying Adaptation Theory tothe study of lexical blocking and it is conducted from two aspects including lexicalblocking phenomenon and deblocking phenomenon. Generally speaking, lexicalblocking phenomenon means that the pre-existence of one lexical item (blocking item)will block the production or the use of another one (blocked item) created by the productive rules or patterns; deblocking phenomenon indicates that blocking iscancelled and the blocked items are practically used. According to the analysis oflexical blocking and deblocking phenomena, major findings of the present researchcan be summarized as follows. Firstly, the emergence of lexical blocking anddeblocking phenomena is in fact a result of using language, which also demonstratesthe process of making language choices. Simply speaking, the former one refers to thefact that language users automatically employ the blocking items to express meaningsand the latter one suggests that language users intentionally choose blocked items.Secondly, the choice-making process in lexical blocking phenomenon reflectslanguage users’ adaptation to communicative context, communicative intentions andthe economy of the lexical system; and the one in deblocking phenomenondemonstrates adaptation to communicative context and language structure. Thirdly,the above choice-making processes are both dynamic processes, in which variousdegrees of consciousness are displayed. Lastly, lexical blocking is not a static andstable rule in language system but should be considered as a dynamic and changinglinguistic phenomenon. Deblocking phenomenon demonstrates that language userswill make adjustment and adaptation to make linguistic choice even with the fact thatthe choice made is not accepted by language system. However, as time goes on, theadjustment and adaptation can lead to language development. If a blocked item hasbeen used for a time, the blocking effect on it may disappear and it will possibly beincluded into language system, which actually shows the dynamic feature of lexicalblocking from another point of view.The present study is only a tentative probe to lexical blocking from theperspective of Adaptation Theory, and therefore, it is inevitable that some limitationsand problems exist in the thesis.