A Study Of Pragmatic Enrichment Of Loose Use Of Words In Verbal Communication From The Perspective Of Lexical Pragmatics

In our daily verbal communication,we may notice that people do not always say things in a precise way and there are some loose uses of words.This is an indication of looseness of language use.To have a better understanding of this phenomenon,many scholars have conducted their studies from various perspectives such as logic,semantics,pragmatics,cognitive linguistics and so on.But the results of these studies suggest that few scholars focus on pragmatic enrichment of loose use of words from the perspective of lexical pragmatics which,as a new branch of pragmatics thriving at the end of 20th century,investigates the pragmatic processing of uncertain word meaning.As the key research of lexical pragmatics,pragmatic enrichment implies that information processing,such as utterance interpretation,is a process in which the hearer is supposed to make pragmatic processing of the utterance based on context.This process includes pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening.However,how loosely used words are pragmatically enriched and why pragmatic enrichment of loosely used words happens in verbal communication have not been answered systematically.To address these questions,the corpus-referenced qualitative research method was adopted in this thesis.With the American sitcom Modern Family as the corpus,Season One of Modern Family is chosen as the main research material.Some typical examples are analyzed in detail in order to show the specific process of pragmatic enrichment of loosely used words in verbal communication and explain why pragmatic enrichment of loosely used words happens.The following findings have been obtained through the above analysis:First of all,pragmatic enrichment of loosely used words in verbal communication is not a process of searching for prototypical meaning,but a dynamic process of searching for optimal relevance from the context based on the hearer’s inference.This process involves pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening.Second,in verbal communication,pragmatic enrichment consists of pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening is used as the strategies to understand the loosely used words,which contributes to the effective communication in our daily life.From the perspective of theoretical significance,this study can enrich the existing research of pragmatic enrichment,provide new sights to lexical pragmatics and shed light on the further study in this filed.As for practical significance,it gives us a better understating of utterances and promotes communication in our daily life.