Lexical Pragmatic Processes In English Children’s Short Stories

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with lexical pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening and their contributions to modified words meaning as well as various contextual factors affecting them in English children short stories. It basically aims to identify linguistic phenomena which their understanding requires lexical adjustment of linguistically encoded meaning, context and pragmatic expectations. In this regard, the data of the study comprises thirty extracts of the type (utterance-response) selected of five English short stories written for children aged (8-12 years old). They are retrieved from the English website: (Book trust. Get you read). Thus, the study hypothesizes that broadening cases are more commonly identified than narrowing ones in this genre. It also assumes that contextual factors affecting narrowing cases are different from those effecting broadening cases. To achieve its aim, based on relevance theoretic approach to lexical pragmatics, the present study develops a pragmatic model of lexical pragmatic processes which is intended to analyse these extracts taking into account different types of short stories. The findings statistically reveal significant differences in the number of the linguistic phenomena identified. Yet, no difference is recognized concerning contextual factors. The study, then, suggests that lexical pragmatic processes are important components of the effective interpretation of modified meanings in the targeted data.