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An Optimality-Relevance Account on the Comprehension of English Honographic Antonymy

Author: ZhangXiaoXia
Tutor: TangRuiLiang
School: Southwestern University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: homographic antonymy the optimality-relevance model constraint pragmatic enrichment pragmatic strengthening
CLC: H313
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 61
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Abstract

Homographic antonymy, as a special sub-category of polysemy and antonymy words, is featured by one word form with two opposing meanings in its sense relation system. Different linguistic schools study homographic antonymy from different perspectives. Although some achievements on homographic antonymy have been made in historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics in respects of evolvement, classification, and the mechanisms of meaning formation of homographic antonymy, the research on the process of comprehending homographic antonymy is sterile. It is with this background that this thesis studies the comprehension process of homographic antonymy within the theoretical framework of lexical pragmatics.Lexical pragmatics focuses on the semantic underspecification of lexical items of pragmatic inference in language use. There are two attempts to approach the semantic underdetermination of lexical items in language use:optimality-theoretical pragmatics (OTP) and relevance-theoretical pragmatics (RTP). In lexical pragmatics, optimality theory in pragmatics to lexicons is initiated and elaborated by Reinhard Blutner (1998, 2004,2006) while relevance theory to lexicons has been mainly developed by Carston (2002,2007), and Deirdre Wilson (2002,2003,2007). According to relevance-theoretic heuristic on lexicons, the addressee will take pragmatic enrichment and pragmatic strengthening as ways of pragmatic processing to get the speaker’s intended meaning. And the processing takes place in cognitive context. According to Blutner’s interpretive optimality, a form and meaning pair is a possible pair to be the output if this form and meaning pair belongs to the GEN. Meanwhile, optimal pair will be generated as a result of evaluating constraints on the form and meaning pair in EVAL. The optimal output is the communicative intention. Although relevance-theoretical heuristic explicates pragmatic processing ways on the semantic underspecifiction of lexical items, no clear procedures of the comprehension are provided. Meanwhile, the interpretative optimality in OTP takes GEN and EVAL as the procedures to resolve the semantic underspecifiction of lexical items by lacking of clear processing ways. The present study proposes optimality-relevance model to reveal the addressee’s comprehension process of homographic antonymy in language communication based on the strong points of OTP and RTP on lexicons.In language use, homographic antonymy is one of the language phenomena of semantic underspecifiction. It seems that people can automatically get the right communicative meaning of homographic antonymy in communication even if homographic antonymy has semantic underspecification. The optimality-relevance model takes GEN and EVAL as two phases of comprehension and pragmatic enrichment and pragmatic strengthening as pragmatic processing ways to evaluating constrains on form and meaning pairs of homographic antonymy in EVAL so that a relatively evident comprehension process on the part of the addressee is revealed.Through applying the optimality-relevance model to investigate some homographic antonymy words, the information gap between encoded meaning and contextual meaning is resolved within the model so as to prove that this model has certain explanatory power on the process of comprehending homographic antonymy on the part of the addressee in the hope of enriching the current research on homographic antonymy and having some implications on other form and meaning asymmetries in relation of the comprehension.

An Optimality-Relevance Account on the Comprehension of English Honographic Antonymy

Abstract

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