2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Relevance-theoretic analysis of idioms

Research Project

Project/Area Number	23520577
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Section	一般
Research Field	English linguistics
Research Institution	Gunma University
Principal Investigator	IDO Ryo 群馬大学, 社会情報学部, 准教授 (90334086)
Project Period (FY)	2011 – 2013
Keywords	イディオム / アドホック概念 / 関連性理論
Research Abstract	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.