A Lexical-Pragmatic Study Of Narrowing And Broadening Of Polysemous Word Meaning

Polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon that a word has two or more senses which are related to each other. The production and understanding mechanism of polysemy has long been among the central topics of linguistic study. However, most of the previous studies focus on the internal structure of polysemy and the rules and model of word meaning development and ignore the study of the selection and understanding of polysemous word meaning. Both structural semantics and cognitive linguistics on polysemy ignore the contextual factors. Therefore, neither of them can fully explain the narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning.Lexical pragmatics is a new topic of foreign linguistic study in recent years. It is a new branch of pragmatics and develops very fast which investigates the process by which linguistically-specified word meanings are modified in use. It is an interdisciplinary to semantics, pragmatics, lexicology and cognitive linguistics. Its study includes information processing such as pragmatic narrowing and broadening, especially pragmatic processing of lexical terms in utterance comprehension. Lexical pragmatics takes Grice's cooperative principle as the theoretical basis, combines with pragmatic mechanism, contextual and encyclopedic knowledge and studies lexical meaning dynamically. It points out that the study of semantic underspecification of word meaning is a process which needs to combine with contextual and encyclopedic knowledge and conduct pragmatic enrichment and the understanding of polyemy in certain context is the weakening, extension and enrichment of its encoded meaning.This thesis, on the basis of the previous studies, analyzes and interprets the definition and classification of narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning from the perspective of lexical pragmatics and takes the two main pragmatic principles of lexical pragmatics---conversational implicature theory and relevance theory as theoretical basis and analyzes and compares the narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning with English and Chinese materials. Finally, it draws the conclusion that the comprehension of polysemy must make necessary pragmatic inference and enrichment and the narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning is the result of pragmatic enrichment to the encoded meaning of polysemy. According to relevance theory, narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning is a cognitive process in which the hearer searches for the relevance according to certain context. The hearer has to make cognitive inferential efforts. When the hearer gets enough relevant contextual information, narrowing or broadening of word meaning will stop immediately. Relevance theory under the framework of lexical pragmatics can reasonably explain the cause, process and termination of narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning and thus the study of relevance theory on narrowing and broadening of polysemous items has instructional significance.This thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to purposes and significance of the study, research methodology and data collection and the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 is literature review. It introduces the concept of polysemy and reviews the previous studies of polysemy, including structural semantics and cognitive approach and points out the limitations of them. Chapter 3 is a brief introduction to lexical pragmatics, its theoretical basis and basic features. Chapter 4 makes an analysis of narrowing and broadening of polysemous word meaning from the perspective of lexical pragmatics with English and Chinese materials. Chapter 5 summarizes the thesis and points out the major findings and limitations of the study and suggestions for further studies.