AStudy Of Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment-an Adaptation Approach

In verbal communication, a certain word often conveys not only its own lexicalmeaning but also the pragmatic meaning, endowed by pragmatic elements, which mayhave narrower or broader scope than its original meaning. Philosophy, semantics,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics have studied this linguistic phenomenon fromdifferent perspectives, but a systematic and comprehensive study is still expected.Thus, the aim of this thesis is to make a tentative study on the interpretation of lexicalenrichment (narrowing and broadening of word meaning) in English and Chinese inthe domain of lexical pragmatics in the framework ofAdaptation Theory.Lexical pragmatics is a new branch that appeared at the end of the20thcentury,which intends to provide a framework to probe into the processes involved in bridgingthe gap between the encoded meaning and the communicated meaning of lexical units.The main concern of lexical linguistics is the pragmatic processing of theindeterminacy of word meaning. Based on the fact that there is the inconsistencebetween the encoded meaning of a lexical unit and its communicated meaning, thethesis is to probe into the contextual instantaneousness and the process of narrowingand broadening of word meaning.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is a comprehensive and practical theory inpragmatics, which covers all-round range of social, cultural and cognitive aspectsinvolved in constructing meaning in language use. The theory holds that language useis a process of making choices, whether consciously or unconsciously, and thischoice-making occurs as soon as language is used. In the course of communication, itis supposed to adapt to both the speaker and hearer’s mental world, social world andphysical world. As the changing of literal meaning in actual use, lexical pragmatics isa linguistic adaptation process happening at the level of lexicon, the inevitable resultof choice making and the necessary result of adaptation to mental, social and physical worlds. The processes of lexical enrichment are dynamic combined with differentdegrees of consciousness. In a word, what Adaptation Theory discusses is dynamiccommunicative theory of language. Thus, pragmatics has a coherent and rationalanalysis framework with this theory.Thus, within the framework of Adaptation Theory, the present research exploresthe interpretation process of narrowing and broadening of word meaning in dynamiccontext via the illustration of several representative examples from both English andChinese. After the analysis, the comprehension procedure can be investigated. Indifferent verbal communication, people tend to construct the ad hoc context combinedwith encyclopedic information, make different adaptations and linguistic choices onthe basis of pragmatic triggers. Thus, through narrowing and broadening of wordmeaning, the hearer can construct the ad hoc concept, figure out the implicatures ofthe speaker and reach the adaptation balance between the speaker and hearer in theirstrategy-choosing process. This thesis covers the comparative study of lexicalpragmatic enrichment between English and Chinese and the result shows that lexicalpragmatic enrichment in these two languages experiences the similar comprehensionprocedure. However, the examples of Chinese involved are mainly about catchwordsin society while the English examples are related to some daily expressions. Thispoint indicates that the lexical enrichment has been a common phenomenon inEnglish-speaking countries. These findings have some meaningful implications forlanguage teaching and lexical acquisition: teachers should adopt integratedmethodology, help students construct ad hoc context and take the factors of society,culture and cognition into consideration to facilitate students’ vocabulary learning andimprove their ability of understanding vocabulary.