SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Lexical meaning in communication is often underdetermined and requires pragmatic enrichment for full interpretation. This thesis examines how four-character Chinese idioms and their parodic variations are interpreted within the framework of relevance theory. It aims to elucidate the complex interplay between flexibility and constraints in lexical meaning construction such as idioms. Chinese idioms possess semantic duality, having two layers of meaning: literal and figurative, making it necessary to investigate the semantic distance between the two layers, which has been identified as a research question on ‘semantic correlative degree’. All four-character Chinese idioms are categorized into three distinct types based on this degree. To facilitate this investigation, a database of four-character parodic Chinese idioms was extracted from the BCC Corpus and subjected to quantitative analysis using SPSS and AntConc software. The chi-square test was employed to explore the independence between the semantic correlative degree and the parody form of these idioms, revealing that the semantic correlative degree indeed exerts a significant influence on the parodic useage of these idioms. This thesis then explores the encoded and ad hoc concepts of the four-character parodic Chinese idioms, offering a relevance-theoretic account of how parodic idioms are pragmatically interpreted in diverse contexts. It identifies four types of contextual modulation that occur during this interpretive process: (1) lexical narrowing, (2) lexical broadening, (3) semantic expansion and contraction, and (4) feature extraction and integration. These modulations highlight how meaning is reconfigured during the process of ad hoc concept formation. Incorporating theories of lexical priming and semantic prosody, this thesis offers a unified explanation for the phenomenon of lexical meaning modulation. Analysis of corpus data uncovered instances of infelicitous use of four-character parodic Chinese idioms, where semantic conflicts among the idiom components give rise to semantic tension within a specific context, either structural or pragmatic. This demonstrates the complex balance between creativity and constraints in lexical meaning construction. Factors constraining semantic adjustment are identified and proposed in this thesis, including: (1) grammatical factors, such as lexical grammaticalization, hierarchical structure, and structural pattern of four-character parodic idioms; (2) semantic factors such as semantic core and semantic network; and (3) cognitive factors, including the recognizability of the original idioms and the mapping relations between cognitive domains.