A Neo-Gricean Lexical Pragmatic Study Of Lexical Cloning

Lexical cloning refers to the phenomenon whereby there is a modifier reduplication of a lexical item, and the reduplicated modifier is used to single out some privileged sense, in contrast to other senses, of an ambiguous, polysemous, vague or loose lexical expression. The phenomenon of lexical cloning can be found in a variety of languages and it is frequented most within the English language and its varieties.Lexical cloning, as a recent language phenomenon, attracts more and more attention of those researchers who focus on the study of lexical pragmatics. Scholars abroad study lexical cloning from a pragmatic perspective without any correspondingly specific model while scholars at home seldom study such a phenomenon with current pragmatic theories. Therefore, to establish a Neo-Gricean pragmatic model through analyzing English lexical cloning may provide a theoretical reference for future related researches; and this model may guide to analyze pragmatic functions of a part of Chinese reduplication, to be more precise, to analyze pragmatic functions of semi-lexical cloning, to prove the existence of Chinese lexical cloning. By sorting examples in academic theses and monographs related to English lexical cloning and Chinese reduplication, this research attempts to establish a Neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis model of lexical cloning and to interpret pragmatic functions of English and Chinese lexical cloning with literature method and speculation method.This research, via analyzing English lexical cloning, attempts to establish such a model with a hierarchical interpreting order of Quantity principle, Information principle, and Manner principle; based on this model, this research also interprets Chinese lexical cloning. It is found out that the abundant Manner-implicatures of English and Chinese lexical clones are addressee-centered, context-dependent, and subject to Manner principle.