從語用學(xué)角度談不同語境的一詞多譯成文

1、A pragmatic study of the polysemy translation under different context摘要詞義是語言中變化最明顯、最頻繁的因素，語言學(xué)家認(rèn)為每個(gè)詞義都構(gòu)成了 典型與邊緣之間的連續(xù)體，因而會(huì)導(dǎo)致詞義的含混與模糊，所以一詞多義現(xiàn)象一 直以來都是傳統(tǒng)語義學(xué)的研究熱點(diǎn)。詞匯語用學(xué)產(chǎn)生以后，對一詞多義現(xiàn)象的研 究被納入到了語用研究的范疇。 在詞匯語用學(xué)的框架下，語境在多義詞習(xí)得中的作用舉足輕重。離開特定 的語境，詞語的真正內(nèi)涵就難以確定，言語就無法準(zhǔn)確地傳遞信息。語境制約詞義理解，詞 義表達(dá)依賴于語境。關(guān)鍵詞：一詞多譯；語用；語境AbstractMea

2、ning is the factor that changes most obviously and frequently in language, linguists believe that each single meaning can form a continuum between the edge and the typical, which can result in a vague and fuzzy category. So, polysemy has long been a research subject of traditional semantics. However

3、, as the emergence of lexical pragmatics, the study of polysemy has been brought into the scope of pragmatics. Within the framework of lexical pragmatics, context is of vital importance in polysemous words' acquisition. One word or phrase in the sentence may trigger a proper context, which affec

4、ts and restricts the understanding of word meanings. The connotation of a word can hardly be identified without the help of context. In this situation, it always results in the failure of information change. Key words: Polysemy; Pragmatic; Context目 錄摘要IAbstractI.Introduction of Polysemy and relevant

5、 concepts11 The Category of Polysemy12 Polysemy and Homonymy23 Polysemy and Ambiguity24 Four Stages of the Development of Polysemy3.The Researching of Context41 The Genesis and Development of Context42 Two Types of Contexts4 Linguistic Context5 Extra-linguistic Context/Context of Situation5. The Inf

6、luence and Role of Context on Polysemy61 The Influence of Context on Polysemy62 The Vital Role of Context in Determination of Word Meaning7.Conclusion8Conferences87.Introduction of Polysemy and relevant concepts1 The Category of PolysemyPolysemy has long been among the central topics in the study of

7、 word meaning, which is also a very prevalent phenomenon for meaning extension or meaning shift in natural language. Many linguists always believe that words are all monosemous at first, but those monosemous words will gradually obtain new meanings owing to various kinds of reasons, and thus the phe

8、nomenon of polysemy occurs without doubt. Smith and Medin (1981:2) have claimed that the characteristic properties of Chair (has legs, can be used to be sit by human beings, etc) might be described as a kind of common chair, but of no particular species or any individual. Categorization is not a mat

9、ter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing. (Lakoff, 1987: 5) In fact, in order to give another theory of categorization alternativel

10、y, Lakoff begins to propose the prototype theory. Of course, his approach to polysemy is also based on his theory: any word has its core meaning, namely, prototypical meaning as another saying, and although all the meanings of a word are different from each other mildly or greatly, they are actually

11、 related with each other through their core meanings, and can also be represented through a single word. Thus different meanings of a word can form a whole network and establish a complex category on the whole. In this category, meanings are all extended from the core meaning and they are presumed t

12、o form a radial construction, named by Lakoff as a radial category.German professor Reinhard Blunter (1998a:115-162) first proposes the term of Lexical Pragmatics and points out that Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that attempts to give a systematic and explanatory account of pragmatics pheno

13、mena. And also he has made some researches in his series of dissertations. Later some other linguists have done researches on polysemy, such as Lascarides & Copestake (1998), Mercer (2000), Packard (2003), Wilson (2003), Jaszczoltand Turner etc., (Chen Xinren, 2005:12). All of them devote the re

14、searches to lexical pragmatics. For these several examples, McCawley argues that a lexical item and a syntactically complex equivalent of it may make different contributions to the interpretation of a sentence without making different contributions to its semantic structure. (McCawley, 1978: 257) Le

15、xical Pragmatics arose as a response to specific problems of lexical semantics that has to be understood in its classical meaning as a truth-functional, static semantics of lexical items. Its concerns mostly include the phenomena like as blocking, pragmatic anomaly and lexical specification. Here in

16、 this thesis, the author attempts to explore the real conceptual mechanism of polysemy by analyzing its pragmatic interpretation, which is also based on the lexical level.2 Polysemy and HomonymyHomonyms are two different words that are identical only in form or pronunciation. However, when we call t

17、wo words with unrelated meanings but the same form or pronunciation "homonyms", there do exist differences. Generally, we call those identical only in forms "homographs", those only in pronunciation "homophones" and those in both "perfect / absolute homonyms".

18、 Homonyms, according to the degree of similarity, fall into three types: homographs, homophones and perfect / absolute homonyms. Homographs are words which are written in the same way but which are pronounced differently and have different meanings (Richards, et al, 2002: 209). Homophones are words

19、which sound alike but are written differently and often have different meanings (ibid: 210). Perfect / absolute homonyms are words identical both in sound and spelling, but different in meaning (Zhang, 1997: 107). Though we could find a number of homographs, homophones and perfect / absolute homonym

20、s in dictionaries, of all the three types "homophones constitute the largest number and are the most common." (ibid: 108) Of course, homonymy means a group of words sharing the same spelling and same pronunciation but this group of words has different kinds of meanings. In fact, homonyms a

21、re the words written in the same way but have different meanings, while polysemy has the related meanings semantically and etymologically.According to Zhang (1997) there are generally three sources of homonyms, i.e., change in sound and spelling, borrowing and shortening. First, most homonyms today

22、were not identical in their Old English (OE) forms, it was through ages of lexical change in sound and spelling that pairs of originally different words became identical in Modern English (ME), for example, eare (OE) ear (ME): an organ with which to listen and hear, oer (OE) ear (ME): the grain bear

23、ing spike of corn or wheat; lang (OE) long (ME): not short, langian (OE) long (ME): to want very much. Second, it is known that English is a sub-branch of Germanic family in the bigger Indo-European family. It has tight ties with many other languages such as Latin (L) or Old French (OF), as the resu

24、lt of borrowing from other languages it not only enriched English vocabulary but also made many words of foreign origins coincide with each other or with those of native origins in sound or spelling, thus causing homonymy, for example, feria (L) fair (ME): a market, foeger (OE) fair (ME): pretty; ba

25、ller (OF) ball (ME): a dancing party, beallu (OE) ball (ME): a round object to play with. Finally, through means of acronym or initialism, many shortened forms happened to be identical with other existing words in sound or form, for example, ad (n.): shortened from advertisement, add (v.): to cause

26、an increase; NOW (n.): the initials of National Organization of Women, now (adv.): at present.3 Polysemy and AmbiguityLexical ambiguity means that the ambiguity of a single word or phrase that is used in different kinds of contexts so as to express more different kinds of meanings. It is difficult t

27、o distinguish between lexical ambiguity and the polysemy, because the definition of polysemy is quite familiar with the definition of lexical ambiguity. However, their analysis of the study perspectives is quite different. According to Saussure s langue and parole theory which claims the different w

28、ays to do analysis on a language, the key different point between langue and parole is that langue is static but parole is dynamic. We thus can find that polysemy is resulting from the static analysis and lexical ambiguity is resulting from the dynamic analysis. Also, polysemy is a cause of lexical

29、ambiguity, but not the only one cause. Mooij (1976) pointed out that no matter how wide the range is, the existing vocabulary in a language is doomed to fail to name all those in the external world or internal human brain. Then, if there were not existing literal meanings, the existing concepts woul

30、d be borrowed. And the result of borrowing is a large amount of metaphorical uses, most of which are consolidated as polysemous words' explanations.There are many ways of constituting metaphorical uses: it can be reached by extending the meaning, for example, "crane"-"lifting mach

31、ine" or transfer the speech of part, for example, "wolf" (n.)-"to behave like a wolf" (v.); and compounds, for example, "crestfallen" to the state of frustration.Also, if there's a need to use some more powerful, more beautiful or milder expressions, i.e., rhet

32、oric measures, metaphors are also created. The most typical example should be euphemistic expressions, such as we use "slow" instead of "foolish", "stupid" or "silly". With metaphor, primary meaning was extended to derived meanings, which gradually lost the rh

33、etoric features. This process in which rhetoric uses transfer to literal meanings (i.e., from metaphor to polysemy) is called "lexicalization". According to Austin, there are necessary ties between sense of a polysemous word, and it is the internal cognitive basis and rules for polysemy (i

34、bid: 120). Hester (1967: 215) also pointed out that we will find metaphorical uses by studying the etym of any word. When we acquire a language (whether native or not) we don't need and are unable to acquire all the derived meanings. However, after the acquisition of the primary meaning, he / sh

35、e can infer the derived meanings according to contexts, and can easily acquire them through common cognitive rules.4 Four Stages of the Development of PolysemySynchronically, polysemy is understood as the coexistence of various meanings of a single word at a certain historical period of a language.

36、From this perspective, the problem of interrelation and interdependence of those individual senses of a single word must be researched. Issues like comparative value of meaning and prototypical/extended meaning are mainly within this scope of research. Concerning the comparative value of individual

37、meanings, it is argued that the frequency of their occurrence in speech is an objective criterion for judgment. That is to say, the meaning with the highest frequency value is synchronically the basic meaning of a lexical item. Besides, the concept of prototypical meaning or central meaning is also

38、being discussed in this approach. It is observed that some meanings of a lexical item are representative of them in isolation, i.e. they invariably occur to people when heard or read. However, other meanings only come to be recognized when used in certain contexts. Meanings in the first situation ar

39、e regarded as prototypical meaning or central meaning, and the latter ones are called extended meanings. With the synchronic perspective; we consider a polysemous lexical item as a synchronic entity. Diachronically, we study the growth or change in the semantic structure of a word, or how the semant

40、ic structure of a word has developed from primary meaning to the present state of polysemy. Language is always developing. For language, there is no absolute invariability; any aspect of language is going to change (Saussure, F, 1980:94). The category of meanings of polysemy is always in a state of

41、change. In the process of category enlargement, new members are derived or split from already existing members mainly metonymy and metaphor, which are two powerful cognitive tools for extension of word meanings. In the process, some old meanings may become obsolete or even disappear, but lexical ite

42、ms tend to increase in the number of meanings. The terms "secondary" and "derived" meaning are to a certain extent synonymous. A "secondary" meaning implies that it could not have appeared before the primary meaning was in existence, and a "derived" meaning no

43、t only implies the same significance of a "secondary" meaning but also refers to that it is dependent on the primary meaning and somehow subordinate to it.The Researching of Context1 The Genesis and Development of ContextThe term 'context' literally means anything that comes with t

44、he text that circumscribes its meaning. It is well understood in linguistics that the same sentence can have a radically different meaning in different environments. Context can be classified as the following six types: historical, cultural, ideological, purposive, receptive, and pedagogic. The diff

45、erent dimensions of context often overlap each other. All of these dimensions of context are co-present in any single literary reading, perhaps though with a different aspect foregrounded as being the most relevant in a particular situation. They can all be explored to render alternative interpretat

46、ions of the same text. Therefore, there is no definite definition of the term context.Kittay (1987: 144) once pointed out that not only a single word may have primary meaning and derived meanings, and utterance also bears both primary and derived meanings. The primary meaning of an utterance is the

47、appropriate combination of all the primary meanings of the words that comprise the utterance with the context. While the addition of the primary meaning is inappropriate in the context, the derived meanings rise. Metaphor, in this sense, is typical of the second situation. As a kind of pragmatic use

48、, when the primary meaning crashes, in order to understand the utterance we need to make a second judgment of its meaning and the references through the context. Goatly and Mooij talked about metaphor and context respectively as "Metaphor comeswhen an utterance is used to refer to an object, co

49、ncept, process, personality, relationship, world, etc. that are not usually referred to in conventional situations or is collected with other unconventional utterances within the context" (Goatly, 1997: 108); "An utterance is of metaphorical use if and only if: a). the utterance and the co

50、ntext show it is related to topic A; b). A should have a literal meaning-F; c). the words-W-in the utterance are partly of the literal uses of A; d). though A and F might indirectly related, the uses in C of A cannot describe F directly; e). however, the utterance is not false, inappropriate or mean

51、ingless" (mooij, 1976: 26).2 Two Types of ContextsThe study of context in polysemy is of great significance from two aspects. On the one hand, words tend to change their meaning from one context to another. What a word means on any given occasion is identified by the context in which it is used

52、. Learning an isolated list of words without reference to the context is of no help to the comprehensive understanding of word meanings. On the other hand, the various contexts where a word appears also provide considerable input from which language learners can pick up large amount of vocabulary kn

53、owledge. No matter what kind of explicit vocabulary instruction they may receive, it can only cover a modest proportion of the words they will learn. So the large vocabularty can only be acquired in context but not vocabulary instruction. Many linguists have been trying to define and classify contex

54、t from different perspectives, such as situational and textual context, transparent and obscure context, macro and micro context, inter-linguistic and extra-linguistic context, and so on. It is evident that all the classifications of context are interrelated. In this paper, in order to combine conte

55、xt theory with polysemy, context is classified into two categories: linguistic context and extra-linguistic context/context of situation. Linguistic ContextLinguistic context refers to interrelation between linguistic units within the language system, including not only collocation of words and sent

56、ences in the article or conversation, but also interrelation between paragraphs and texts. Thus it can be further divided into lexical context, grammatical context and textual context. Lexical context refers to the lexical items combined with a given word, which is also known as collocation. When co

57、llacated with different words, a word may appear to have different meanings. For example, the word dark means "with little or no light" when it is in "a dark room", while it means "sad or gloomy" in "dark future", and also means "evil" when it appear

58、s in "dark power". Grammatical context is the syntacticalstructure in which a given word may appear. The meaning of a word determines its syntactic behavior, and conversely, the syntactic behavior of a word provides crucial information about its meaning. Extra-linguistic Context/Context of

59、 SituationContext of situation, according to Halliday & Hasan(1985, pp. 12-58), is the immediate environment in which a text is actually functioning. The immediate environment refers to such factors as the event, the time, cause, place, topic and participant. Any given instance of language is in

60、extricably bound up with its context of situation and different types of situation require us to handle the language differently. Context of situation comprises background knowledge, actual speech setting and type of discourses. Situational context clues are important in determining the meaning of a word. For example, in a dialogue, we should know the participants, the relationship between them, their educational background, and the