HOW MUCH TIRED ARE YOU? APPROACHES TO VOCABULARY COMPREHENSION
Keywords:
Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Relevance Theory, vocabulary comprehension, tirednessAbstract
This paper presents one radically semantic and one radically pragmatic approach to vocabulary comprehension. As a means of illustrating the workings of the respective approaches – the Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Relevance Theory – one lexical field has been selected for analysis. The aim is to provide an objective assessment of the different approaches to lexical meaning in use by encouraging the reader to derive his/her own implications regarding potential merits and demerits of the theories. Most of all, the reader is prompted to engage in the contemporary discussion of the semantics/pragmatics interface, especially at the level of lexis, by understanding the rationale behind the two extreme positions.
References
Austin 1962: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach 1994: K. Bach, Conversational impliciture, Mind and Language 9: 124-162.
Bach 2006: K. Bach, Impliciture vs. Explicature: What’s the difference?, The Granada workshop on “Explicit Communication“, in honor of Robyn Carston, May 31-June 2.
Blakemore 1987: D. Blakemore, Semantic Constraints on Relevance, Oxford: Blackwell.
Burton-Roberts (ed) 2007: N. Burton-Roberts, Pragmatics, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carston 2002: R. Caraston, Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication, Oxford: Blackwell.
Grice 1989: H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sperber, Wilson 1986/95: D. Sperber, D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell.
Wierzbicka 1996: A. Wierzbicka, Semantics: Primes and Universals, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilson 2003: D. Wilson, Relevance and lexical pragmatics, Italian Journal of Linguistics/Revista di Linguistica 15 (2), 273-291.
