Abstract

 

The interpretation of lexical synonymy has played an essential role in various semantic and pragmatic theories. Compared to lexical synonyms in general context, synonyms generated in specific context are often more creative and indeterminate. For instance, if the adjective “beautiful” appears in a commonly-used phrase “beautiful woman”, it’s synonyms could be “gorgeous” or “attractive”. But when it is used in a specific context such as “beautiful poem”, its synonyms are changed into “delightful”, “meaningful”, or “moving”, which are not part of the encyclopedic information of “beautiful”. We propose that interpreting lexical synonyms in different contexts can shed some light on the debate between Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory and relevance theory regarding lexical meaning and context. We believe that the construction of lexical synonymy is a dynamic process, which involves the interpretation of lexical concept across contexts.

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In Neo-Gricean pragmatics, it is advocated that the interpretation of lexical meaning often involves a default inference, which is automatically assigned to every occurrence of the lexical concept regardless of the situated context (Levinson, 2000). One may also claim that there are two types of context, i.e. default and specific context (Huang, 2012). However, relevance theorists (Sperber and Wilson, 2008; Wilson and Carston, 2007; Kolaiti and Wilson, 2014) tend to give a unified account of lexical meaning and context. They advocate an inferential account of lexical meaning involving the construction of ad hoc concept, which is guided by the expectations of relevance. In their view, this process is in general more flexible and creative than can be accounted for by default approach.

In this research, we will conduct a corpus-based investigation, as well as a synonym generation questionnaire, on Chinese adjectives to test the hypotheses of the two theories. The corpus-based study aims at identifying various discourse contexts that the adjectives may appear, which is accompanied by a questionnaire allowing the subjects to generate appropriate synonyms in sentential contexts. Following Neo-Gricean pragmatic theories, lexical synonyms generated in so-called “default context” shall be substantially different from those in “specific context”. On the other hand, in the framework of relevance theory, lexical synonyms are flexible and indeterminate in both cases, since they are pragmatically inferred by the hearer in situated context through pragmatic inferential mechanism.

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Key Words: lexical synonymy, relevance theory, Neo-Gricean pragmatics, context