A Relevance-theoretic Approach To Pragmatic Enrichment Of Word Meaning

The communicative information of words and word combinations is not the dictionary definition, and in many cases is not the prototypical meaning. It is a kind of textual meaning. Based on the indeterminacy of word meaning, lexical pragmatics came into being, having received wide attention from linguists.Lexical pragmatics is a new concept, which can date back to the end of 20 th century. It focuses on the pragmatic processing of uncertain word meaning. As the main concern of lexical pragmatics, pragmatic enrichment suggests that understanding an utterance is the hearer making inference from the speaker rather than a process of only encoding and decoding. The hearer should process target utterance in different degree according to contextual conditions. The process is referred to ‘pragmatic enrichment' which includes pragmatic narrowing and broadening. However, what triggers the pragmatic enrichment? How can we locate the direction for the pragmatic enrichment? How does the enrichment process work in detail? When should the process draw to an end? All these questions have not been answered. From the perspective of relevance theory, the thesis attempts to narrow down the study of pragmatic enrichment of word meaning, addresses the data from Vampire Diaries and explores the mechanism of pragmatic enrichment.The findings show that the basis of pragmatic enrichment is the cognitive context in relevance theory. The understanding of utterance relies on the mutual cognitive context. The hearer will automatically choose the information of optimal relevance when he/she receives the ostensive stimulus from the speaker. After obtaining the optimally relevant information, the hearer will search for specific word meaning to satisfy the expectation. If the expectation is not satisfied, more efforts will be needed for the hearer to explore the more precise meaning and the pragmatic narrowing arises. Otherwise, the pragmatic broadening appears.The existing studies about pragmatic enrichment of word meaning are limited to narrowing and broadening, but the pragmatic looseness(such as approximation, category extension and metaphorical extension) is ignored. This thesis provides some reference for the study of pragmatic enrichment by analyzing the special phenomenon of pragmatic broadening.