A Relevance-theoretic Study Of Lexical Enrichment

In the process of communication, lots of information carried by words and expressions are neither the literal meanings nor the prototypical meanings. Sometimes people use words approximately. In much of the literature, narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension are used. In communication, when people don't know the exact meaning of a word, they can infer it according to the context, get the context message, then guess the meaning of the word. Psycholinguistics, Lexicology, Semantics and Pragmatics give different explanations on this phenomena. Some scholars study it from the aspects of Pragmatics, Communicative Pragmatics and Cognitive Pragmatics. However, on this phenomena, there isn't the systematic study.Lexical Pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics that investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified ('literal') word meanings are modified in use. It concludes the pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening of words, especially the meanings in certain context. The process is called Lexical Enrichment.In the book"Relevance: Communication and Cognition", Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson proposed the"Relevance Theory". It influenced the field of Pragmatics greatly. It is a theory of communication. Sperber and Wilson studied language communication from the cognitive-psychological aspect. They pointed out that language communication is a process of inference, it is a ostensive-inferential process. According to Relevance Theory, relevance is the basic principle of communication. Sperber and Wilson defined"relevance"as: (1) other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual who processes it; (2) other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort required, the greater the relevance of the input.The purpose of this thesis is to study the pragmatic enrichment of words from the aspect of relevance theory. It tries to analyze the lexical narrowing and lexical broadening from the relevance- theoretic aspect. Lexical narrowing and broadening (approximation, metaphor, category extension) are both the processes of searching for relevance. There is no need for hearers to analyze the literal meanings and the prototypical meanings, the context could activate the meanings of the words. Searching for relevance is the basis of pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening of words. It follows a path of least effort. It involves mutual adjustment of context, explicit content and cognitive effects. It stops when the hearer's expectations of relevance are satisfied (or abandoned). It follows the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, when the hearer gets the relevant meaning he wants, then the inference stops.