A Relevance Theoretic Account Of Narrowing And Broadening Of Chinese Word Meaning

Narrowing and broadening of word meaning are the leading part of thechanges of word meaning. Previous studies of narrowing and broadening of wordmeaning are only limited to definition, classification and characteristic discussionbased on the paradigmatic description. This thesis adopts a method of qualitativeanalysis to analyze the narrowing and broadening of word meaning mainly from acognitive point of view guided by relevance theory, which tries to propose atheoretic analysis of the narrowing and broadening of word meaning. The mainachievement is that it systematically interprets the process of cognitive inferenceof narrowing and broadening of word meaning. It is helpful for human beings torecognize the speaker's intention in verbal communication.This thesis first reviews the conceptual interpretations of word meaning byother linguists, and then advantages and disadvantages of historical semantics andprototype semantics. Historical semantics mainly studies words with fixedmeaning from the changed result. Prototype theorists believe that comprehensionof word meaning starts from searching for meanings or prototype features indealing with information of utterances. The dominating thought that prototypefeatures match prototype semantics of old times possesses some explanatorypower of categories, such as word meaning, syntax, concepts and tenses, and soon. However, we cannot discuss prototype features of a certain word or a conceptowing to the fact that usage and comprehension of language are confined tocontexts. Therefore, there are disadvantages of choosing communicativeinformation according to prototype features.The concept of utterance comprehension guided by relevance theoryproposed has an important influence on lexical pragmatics. Firstly, neither themeaning of the speaker nor the communicative meaning is the encoded meaningwhich is only a clue to obtaining the meaning of the speaker. Secondly, theprocess of obtaining meanings involves the search for the relevance of target information. Explicature and contextual assumptions are mutually adjusted,which should achieve cognitive effects following the most economic cognitiveprocessing effort. Comprehension of utterances from the relevance-theoreticperspective is actually the lexical decoding; however, it is not a pure decodingactivity, which includes inference, such as disambiguation, reference assignments,contextual assumptions, implicatures, etc. The concept communicated by a wordmay go well beyond its encoded literal meaning. It may be narrowing orbroadening of the literal meaning. Robyn Carston interpreted narrowing andbroadening of word meaning through the analysis of metaphors and emphasizedthe importance of the loose use of words in the changes of word meaning.Based on the previous studies of the changes of English word meaningwithin the framework of relevance theory, this thesis will discuss the narrowingand broadening of Chinese word meaning within the framework of relevancetheory. According to relevance theory, it is motivated by searching for relevance.When the encoded literal meaning does not satisfy the hearer's expectation ofrelevance, he is entitled to narrow or broaden it to the point where thisexpectation is satisfied. According to the relevance-theoretic comprehensionprocedure, potential narrowing or broadening should be considered in a sequenceof accessibility, and the first acceptable narrowing or broadening is the one thehearer should choose. This thesis adequately analyzes and interprets thenarrowing and broadening of modern Chinese ad hoc word meaning with vividexamples in certain contexts following a relevance-theoretic comprehensionprocedure. It also discusses important roles played by ad hoc concepts in theprocess of the changes of Chinese ad hoc word meaning. Some Chinese ad hocword meanings deviate from the encoded meanings, which proves that there aresome disadvantages of prototype theory. This thesis proves that relevance theoryis applicable to a reasonable explanation of the changes of Chinese ad hoc wordmeaning, which gives a necessary complement of the study in some degree. Thisthesis tries to prove that it is important and feasible to make use of relevancetheory to interpret the narrowing and broadening of Chinese word meaning. The cognition of the ad hoc meaning of a word is a very promisingassumption in the study of word meaning. Similarities and differences of thenarrowing and broadening of word meaning between English and Chinese arediscussed particularly from the angle of ad hoc word meaning, the process ofwhich will be adequately interpreted within the framework of relevance theory;what's more, the useful assumptions are applied to the lexical acquisition withinrelevance theory. The appearance of ad hoc word meaning provides words with aricher content and broader developing space. The interpretation of the changes ofChinese ad hoc word meaning within relevance theory is a cognitive course ofhuman beings. We try to know about the environments of society, culture, politicsand economy from which language comes out based on the analysis of linguisticphenomena.