A Study On The Relevance Approach To Lexical-Pragmatic Enrichment Of The Indeterminacy Of Adjectives

As a universal linguistic phenomenon, the indeterminacy of adjectives has receivedstudies by different linguistic schools.In the perspective of relevance theory, the present paper attempts to narrow down thestudy of the pragmatic enrichment of the indeterminacy of adjectives in the perspective oflexical pragmatics. Word meanings are studied by lexical pragmatics in utterancecomprehension. And lexical pragmatic is a dynamic course relating to some elements such ascontext and encyclopedic knowledge. It declares that understanding an utterance is the hearermaking inference from the speaker rather than a process of only encoding and decoding. It is amain concern of lexical pragmatics and includes pragmatic narrowing and broadening. Thepragmatic narrowing is the process where a word is used to convey a more specific meaningthan the encoded one by restricting its linguistically-specified denotation, and the pragmaticbroadening is a process which a word is used to convey a more general meaning, withconsequent widening of the encoded meaning.Relevance theory characterizes verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process.The speaker’s ostensive process is a coding process in a manifest way, in other words, thespeaker expresses his communicative intentions with clear and imprecise utterances. On theother hand, inferring is a process in which the addressee conforming to his own cognitivecontext, decodes the speaker’s utterance on the basis of the manifest ways, and then obtainsthe correct interpretation. Thus, on the relevance-theoretic account, we build a cognitivemodel to interpret the pragmatic enrichment of the indeterminacy of adjectives. This studytries to explain not only what the triggers of the Lexical-pragmatic enrichment of theindeterminacy of adjectives are, but alse how to accomplish the course of pramaticenrichment of the indeterminacy of adjective. And the question whether it can reflect thecommonness of information processing in different contexts through the pragmaticenrichment of the indeterminacy of adjectives is also concerned in this thesis.The findings show that cognitive context is basic for the understanding of theindeterminacy of adjectives and based on the mutual cognitive context of the speaker and thehearer, the hearer will automatically enter into the inference process when he receives theostensive stimulus from the speaker. In the inference process, the hearer will deal with allrelated information to achieve optimal relevance of adjectives in utterances. Inrelevance-theoretic procedure, the hearer will use optimal relevance to find the meaning ofadjective to satisfy his expectations, and if he assumes that this is not the speaker’s meaning and more efforts should be made to find the specific meaning of adjective to satisfy hisexpectations, pragmatic narrowing happens. If he assumes that this is the speaker’s meaningand does not need more specific information, pragmatic broadening happens.This thesis provides a new point of view to the pragmatic-cognitive study of theindeterminacy of adjectives. It as well gives evidence to explain that the choosing andunderstanding of the indeterminacy of adjectives is a pragmatic-cognitive issue based oncontext within lexical pragmatics. And there is commonness of information processing indifferent contexts through the pragmatic enrichment of the indeterminacy of adjectives.