Lexical Pragmatical Analysis Of English Body-part Idioms From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

English idioms, the crystallization of human language and culture, play anincreasingly vital role in the use of human language. The correct use of Englishidioms makes one’s speech or writing more precise and vivid. However, the nature ofEnglish idioms’ semantic implication, profundity and structural fixedness and thespecial role inevitably make them difficultly understood. Since idioms drew constantattention in the1960s, they have been the focus of much more scholars，who studythem from the view of meaning, form and function, etc. From the traditional view,idioms are regarded as phrases and expressions which could not be separate. Theidiomatic meanings cannot be inferentially predicted from the meanings of the parts,which constitute the whole idiom. In the conventional view, there are some limitationsabout the further researches of idioms, in which a large portion of these studies haveremained on the level of language.Relevance Theory probes into discourse and verbal utterance from the cognitivepsychological aspect. It also points out that the process of communication is the sameas the process of ostensive-inferential communication. Relevance, which isconsidered as the core part of Relevance Theory, has an influence on the contextualeffect and processing effort; and the contextual effect deliberately is involved inhuman utterance. There is a direct link between contextual effect and relevance, andin other equal conditions, the greater the contextual effect, the stronger the relevance;processing effort and relevance have interactive relationship, for instance, othersbeing equal conditions, the least the processing effort, the stronger the relevance.Lexical pragmatics makes an investigation of the specific meaning of word indifferent contexts. At the time, Lexical narrowing and lexical broadening take placein the process of lexical pragmatic enrichment in a specific context. In Relevancetheory, lexical narrowing and broadening, which are the same process of pragmaticenrichment, aims to look for the optimal relevance. The hearer considers the literalmeaning of word as a clue to activate the relevant relevance assumption in a specificcontext. When the optimal relevance is attained by the hearer, with the mutualadjustment of context assumption, encyclopedia knowledge and cognitive effect, andthen, the lexical pragmatic enrichment is finished.The thesis focuses on the most common idioms----human body idioms. Basedon relevance-theoretic exploration, the thesis, under the framework of lexical pragmatics, makes a discussion and analysis of lexical narrowing and broadening inhuman body idiom interpretation. Cognitive mechanisms play an important role inidiom interpretation. From a metaphorical view, constituent words of idioms are likeraw materials, and idiomatic meanings of idioms produced by the use of metaphor,then, cognitive mechanisms are compared to the machine which processes the rawmaterial into product. At the same time, human embodied experiences are identifiedas cognitive mechanisms and provide Cognitive mechanisms experiential basis.Furthermore, the optimal relevance in specific context will be gained by the hearerfinds out. Thus, the selection and understanding of word meaning are cognitive andpragmatic problems based on context.