A Study Of Polysemy In An Optimal Contextual Enrichment Model Of Lexical Pragmatics

Polysemy has long been among the central topics in the study of word meaning. The traditional approach, namely the classical view or structuralism, emphasizes the research on the relationship between different senses of a polysemous word. Their researches are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanism. Therefore, they fail to reveal the essence of it and to give a satisfactory explanation of the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy. Based on Lakoff s (1987, 1989) modern cognitive concepts, many linguists' pioneering work studies the motivation of polysemy in the prototype model and further explores the motivation of sense extension. However, neither approach pays duly adequate attention to the restriction problem of a lexical item being polysemous.Lexical pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics in recent years that investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified word meanings are modified in use. According to lexical pragmatics, polysemy can arise out of contextual effects. And its proper formulation of Q-principle and I-principle enables the clarification of lexical-pragmatic processes governed by general pragmatic principles which apply to a...