A Truth-Conditional Pragmatic Study Of Near-Synonymous Expressions In English News Texts

Synonyms and near-synonyms are indispensable in English news texts.Words,phrases,or word groups constituting the semantic relation of synonymy are often used by English news writers to enhance textual coherence,reiterate important ideas,and convey pragmatic implicatures,and thus are of high research value.Taking as a corpus the news texts from The Economist,and Yahoo News website,this study selects target(near-)synonyms for research at the textual level,and classifies(near-)synonyms into attributive(near-)synonyms and referential(near-)synonyms under the principle of textual coherence,the criterion of reference,and that of semantic properties.The present study aims to address three research questions,namely(1)What pragmatic processes are involved in understanding attributive(near-)synonyms?(2)What pragmatic processes are involved in understanding referential(near-)synonyms? and(3)How do pragmatic processes affect the truth-value of(near-)synonymous propositions?For this reason,an analytical model for(near-)synonym understanding is established following Recanati’s Truth-Conditional Pragmatics to analyze the pragmatic inference processes involved in understanding the meaning of(near-)synonymous expressions as well as the effect of(near-)synonym use on propositional truth value.Analysis reveals that firstly,understanding attributive(near-)synonyms involves the pragmatic processes of zero modulation,free enrichment,loosening,or semantic transfer.Secondly,understanding referential(near-)synonyms involves the pragmatic processes of saturation or free enrichment.Thirdly,the interchange of attributive(near-)synonyms in the same news text does not affect propositional truth value,but the interchange of referential(near-)synonyms may affect the propositional truth value,depending on the meaning input they provide for the proposition.Referential(near-)synonyms which input the contextual referent for a proposition do not affect its truth value,while those which input no contextual referent for the proposition cannot be interchanged because they affect propositional truth value.