Lexical Concept Adjustment in Mechanical Engineering Discourse

Abstract

The lexical concept adjustment represents a significant aspect of the pragmatic meaning and has been approached from several perspectives in literature. As the semantics-pragmatics interface is a matter that attracts numerous debates among pragmaticians, the boundary between cases of polysemy and the semantic meaning adjustment in the context is also blurred. There has been no agreement whether a lexical concept adjustment can be regarded as a primary (necessary) or a secondary (optional) pragmatic process. The present article discusses cases of meaning disambiguation and lexical narrowing. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how a lexical concept adjustment contributes to the pragmatic meaning construction in the discourse under analysis. The present paper deals with the data obtained from the chapters on woodworking and metal processing borrowed from the Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety. The findings indicate that there is no clear-cut boundary between the processes of the lexical meaning disambiguation and a lexical concept adjustment as they both elaborate on the linguistic (semantic) meaning of a word or an expression taking into consideration all aspects of the contextual information available. Further research can be conducted to approach the issue from the quantitative perspective.