A Study Of Polysemy From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Enrichment

Polysemy refers to the phenomenon that one lexical unit may be associated with a whole range of senses which are related to each other in a systematic way (Blutner, 2000). Polysemy has long been among the central topics in the study of word meaning. The traditional approach, namely the classical view or structuralism, are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanism. Therefore, they fail to reveal the essence of polysemy. Within the theory of cognitive linguistics, the motivation and model of polysemy are explored. However, this approach doesn't pay due adequate attention to the restriction of a lexical item being polysemous.According to Lexical Pragmatics, a considerable part of the phenomenon can be accounted for by using the conception of Lexical Pragmatics: pairing (radical) semantic underspecification in the lexicon with a pragmatic mechanism of contextual enrichment. Actually, this concept is consistent with the notion of pragmatic enrichment put forward by Relevance Theory. This thesis proposes that pragmatic enrichment including Narrowing and Broadening can be a major approach to study polysemy in the framework of Lexical Pragmatics.Neo-Grice Theory and Relevance Theory are two major approaches to explain the phenomenon of Narrowing and Broadening currently. This thesis makes an analysis between the two approaches and demonstrates Neo-Grice Theory is able to account for part of the phenomenon of Narrowing, but leaves many aspects of the Narrowing process unexplained. Furthermore, it gives no solution to Broadening. According to Relevance Theory, understanding of meaning by pragmatic enrichment can be analyzed as the process of triggering the search of relevance. Human beings try to make less cognitive efforts to search for the relevant lexical meaning by constructing relevant contextual assumptions, which ends successfully with the greater cognitive effect by constructing optimal relevance.In the end of the thesis, I propose an observation of pragmatic enrichment by the approach of schema categorization, in order to present a new cognitive perspective to the study. I find that either pragmatic Narrowing or Broadening of a polysemous item can be understood as a process which is conducted on the basis of partial resemblance between the concepts the speaker means to express and the existing schema meanings of the existing item which the speaker or writer finally directly uses. Furthermore, enrichment of a polysemous item involves a process of maintenance or broadening of schema meaning, and plays an important role in producing new lexical meanings of a polysemous word.