Relevance-theoretic analysis of idioms

最近在关联理论框架内对词汇语用学的研究表明，词汇所编码的概念可以进行语用调整(即词汇的扩大、缩小或定语的使用)，并将其构建为解释说话人意图的语用过程的一部分。这种以关联原则为指导的推理过程被称为即席概念建构。它不仅对话语的明示意义的恢复有了新的启示，而且对隐喻等修辞的理解也有了新的启示。在本研究中，我们将特殊概念的概念进一步扩展，将其适用范围从单词层面扩展到短语层面，并认为在包含习语的话语的理解过程中，特殊概念是在短语层面上构建的。在此基础上，本文提出了利用即席概念框架进行习语研究的几点建议。

Recent approach to lexical pragmatics within the framework of relevance theory claims that the concept linguistically encoded by word may be pragmatically adjusted (i.e. lexical broadening, narrowing or attributive use) and constructs ad hoc concept as a part of the pragmatic process of interpreting the speaker's intended meaning. This inferential process which is guided by the principle of relevance is called ad hoc concept construction. It sheds new lights not only on the recovery of the explicature of the utterance, but also on the understanding of figures of speech such as metaphor. In this research, we take this idea of ad hoc concept one step further by expanding its applicable scope from word level to phrase level, and argue that during the comprehension process of utterance containing an idiom, ad hoc concept is constructed at phrase level. And we make some suggestions for further research on idioms using the framework of ad hoc concept.