Pragmatic Enrichment Of Hyponymy In Legal English

We all know that the understanding of the utterance is complex, and it is not merely a process of information-encoding or information-decoding. The listener needs to conduct the pragmatic processing of the information which speaker communicates, and this process is called “pragmatic enrichment.”In respect of hyponymy in semantics, the more hyponyms there are, the richer connotation will be,the more super-ordinates there are, the richer connotation will be. It is same with the vocabulary in legal English. Therefore, the proper use of hyponymy is related to pragmatic enrichment.Legal English is a kind of community language, a kind of language variety. Pragmatic enrichment also exists in the course of legal-English communication. However, the author finds out that many scholars have made the studies on the sense relation of the legal lexicon but most of their studies have concentrated on the relation of synonymy and antonymy. Hyponymy is an important part of the sense relation, and therefore, this paper puts hyponymy of the vocabulary in legal English as the research object, and does the further analysis and discussion. On the other hand, further studies show that the researches on hyponymy seldom go beyond the lexical level(phrasal, sentential, textual level). Thus, this thesis broadens the research scope of hyponymy.Lexical pragmatics is a new and developing field in contemporary linguistics, and its theoretical basis is closely connected with Grice's Conventional Implicature and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory. This thesis tries to make researches on the enrichment of hyponymy of legal English in the perspective of the Conversational Implicature and the Relevance Theory, taking into account the different contexts of the communication.The purpose of this thesis is to enrich the theories of lexical pragmatics and forensic linguistics.