A Study Of Pragmatic Enrichment Of English Basic Color Adjectives From A Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Color words, as one kind of the sense words reflecting concepts of the color domain, are a vital part of language vocabulary. Linguists have always been concerned about the basic color adjectives for its ambiguity and changeableness in meaning.Lexical pragmatics focuses on the unsolved situations or phenomena of lexical semantics under the detailed explanations of lexicon, such as lexical blocking, the pragmatics of adjectives,and systematic polysemy. Nowadays, relevance theory has become the main stream theory in lexical pragmatics study. A large amount of researches provided a vital basis for cognitive study of the basic color words.Many former researchers had yielded significant which related to grammar, rhetoric, semantic, cultural connotation and others on color words from the diachronic or comparative perspective. A large amount of former researches was a vital basis of cognitive study on the basic color words.The thesis mainly adopts three research methods including documentary collection, introspection and deduction. And, it takes the six English basic color adjectives: white, black, red, green, yellow and blue, as the objects of study. Combined with the analysis of pragmatic enrichment and Lexical Pragmatic study about the pragmatics of adjectives, it tries to build a cognitive model to interpret the pragmatic enrichment in English basic color adjectives with the relevance-theoretic account.This study tries to explain three questions: 1)What are the processes and characteristics of pragmatic enrichment of English basic color adjectives? 2) What are the mechanisms of pragmatic enrichment of English basic color adjectives from the perspective of relevance theory?The main findings of this thesis are generalized as follows: 1) I proceed to establish the prototypical meaning of six English basic color adjectives(white, black, red, green, yellow and blue) accroding to The Principled Polysemy approach:(1) earliest attested meaning;(2)predominance in the semantic network;(3) ease of predicting sense extensions. In order to make the prototypical meaning clear, this task will complete by inferring from the relevant researches before and some statistics from both large corpora(BNC) and The Oxford English Dictionary(2nd Edition). 2) After a unique and systematic analysis of pragmatic enrichment of English basic color adjectives under the framework of relevance theory, a cognitive model was came up to interpret the pragmatic enrichment in English basic color adjectives with the relevance-theoretic account.The thesis has theoretical and practical significance: 1) Combined the preceding researches with the official statistics which is from the large corpora(BNC) and The Oxford English Dictionary(2nd Edition), this thesis makes an attempt to study the basic color adjectives in the filed of foreign language teaching and translation with the help of lucid explanation of relevance theory. 2) In practice, this thesis will help the learners catch the optimal relevance of information in communication through the most laborsaving cognitive method, and pay more attention to the changes and development in the meaning of a word.