Pragmatic Enrichment Of Nonliteral Use Of Words In Verbal Communication

Examining daily conversations, we may find that not all we say is precise. Thereare basically two kinds of meaning in verbal communication：literal meaning andnonliteral meaning. Nonliteral use of language can be seen as looseness of thelanguage. This being the case, the study is mainly about lexical meaning in languageuse, especially for nonliteralness of the utterance in verbal communications. Amechanism of pragmatic enrichment is required to account for lexical looseness whenthe appropriate specified meaning is selected during verbal communication.Pragmatic enrichment is the key notion in this dissertation which includes thepragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening (here, pragmatic broadening can besubdivided into approximation and metaphorical extension) of lexicon, linguisticstructures and utterance in certain context.With the verbal communications from the American sitcom The Big Bang Theoryas research materials, this dissertation is designed to deal with the nonliteralness oflanguage from the perspective of lexical pragmatics. To be more specific, theobjective of this research is to expound the process of pragmatic enrichment ofnonliteral words. The following three questions will be explored in this dissertation:1. Does “nonliteral use of words” phenomenon exist in American sitcom The BigBang Theory? Do these words go through pragmatic enrichment?2. In what ways are words of nonliteral use pragmatically enriched in Englishcommunication?3. Why does pragmatic enrichment of nonliteralness happen in Englishcommunication?During the analysis, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted. Themajor findings can be summarized as follows: firstly, the nonliteral use of words doesexist in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and all the nonliteralnessexperiences pragmatic enrichment; secondly, the audiences select the optional relevance from the context to understand the utterance, and pragmatic narrowing andpragmatic broadening are used in the process of pragmatic enrichment; finally, theprocess of pragmatic enrichment was expanded in details. It is hoped that the study dohelp people understand verbal contexts properly and promote communication in dailylife.