Pragmatic Enrichment And Anomaly, And Lexical Blocking

Lexical Pragmatics, a new concept in the study of language, which emerged in the late 20th century as a branch of pragmatics, investigates the process by which linguistically specified ('literal') meanings of words are modified in use. and concerns the interface study among pragmatics, semantics (esp. cognitive semantics), lexicon and cognitive linguistics. It includes the information construction of pragmatic narrowing and broadening of word meanings, especially, the pragmatic treatment of certain lexis in utterance understanding. Its current concerns include such phenomena as pragmatic enrichment, pragmatic anomaly and lexical blocking.The analysis puts emphasis on the lexis similar to pragmatic triggers in communication. It aims at giving a systematic account of the semantic underspecification of words or expressions. Their linguistically encoded or prototypical meanings are found inadequate in utterance interpretation, thus such meanings need to be narrowed in a more restricted sense or broadened approximately as well as metaphorically in a more general sense until their optimal relevance is satisfied in context. This thesis endeavors to explore the meaning of adjectives in English and reveal how such phenomena as pragmatic enrichment and anomaly and lexical blocking act, in the ground of the theories of lexical pragmatics including the Radical Underspecification View, Q-principle. l-principle and four assumptions of lexical pragmatics. This thesis is to study the meaning of adjectives at the theoretical level and much evidence is given to support the study. It proceeds in the following way:Chapter 1 presents the background and the research basis of the study. Chapter 2 lays out the previous study on the meaning of adjectives, where major classical views are briefly reviewed, with a more detailed discussion on several issues crucially relevant to the present topic. Chapter 3 sets up the theoretical framework of the present research on lexical pragmatics. The definition of lexical pragmatics and its basic concepts and assumptions are briefly introduced, and the new formulation of pragmatic principles is proposed. Chapter 4 attempts to explore the meaning of adjectives within the phenomena of the pragmatic enrichment and tries to analyze narrowing and broadening. Chapter 5 tries to reveal how anomaly and lexical blocking act in the ground of the theories of lexical pragmatics. Chapter 6 is the conclusion, which provides a short comment on the present study of meaning of adjectives and suggests that future research on lexical pragmatics demand more empirical study.