English Lexical Pragmatic Information Processing: An Eye Movement Study

Lexical pragmatics is an interface research of lexical semantics and pragmatics that emerged in the late 1990 s.The understanding of the words(key words)which have ad hoc concepts is an important part of it.The scholars are interested in the understanding result of the key words.This thesis mainly focuses on the processing of the key words' ad hoc concepts.Based on the studies of Carston,Wilson as well as Ran Yongping,this thesis introduces key words containing lexical pragmatic information.Then,they are compiled into three groups of sentences: sentence A with the dictionary meaning,sentence B with the ad hoc concept 1 and sentence C with the ad hoc concept 2.With the help of eye movement experiment,this research attempts to answer the following 3 questions: 1)Is there any difference between the processing of a sentence with key word's dictionary meaning and the ad hoc concept? 2)When processing a sentence with the key word's ad hoc concept,do readers pay the same attention to other words in the sentence? 3)What are the characteristics of readers' attention to the key word in processing the ad hoc concept of it? The experiment aims to prove the presupposition that the guiding information(before the key word)and additional explanation(after the key word)are the main elements within a sentence that promote the ad hoc concept(non-dictionary meaning)of the key word.The study has the following findings: First of all,taking the participants' processing of sentences with dictionary meanings of key words as reference,this thesis summaries the trajectory of 30 participants' eye movement to conclude that the processing of sentences with ad hoc concepts of key words is more complex.Next,according to the total fixation count and total fixation duration,this thesis finds the guiding information and additional explanation draw more attention of the participants.These two conclusions can demonstrate the presupposition that the guiding information and additional explanation are the main elementswithin a sentence that promote the ad hoc concept of the key word,these elements play a vital role in evoking the participants' related social cultural knowledge and help them to achieve optimal relevance.What's more,the key words within sentences also draw more of participants' attention,which can prove that these key words indeed have ad hoc concepts and participants need more on-line processing to confirm its pragmatic information.