Lexical meaning contextualization and semantic changes: The case of the Mandarin Chinese discourse marker dangran.

One of the major tasks of historical pragmatics is to account for the pragmatic mechanisms underlying semantic changes. However, previous research generally ignored the heterogeneity in the pragmatic mechanisms of semantic changes. Drawing insights from Truth Conditional Pragmatics, this paper proposes the Lexical Meaning Contextualization model and uses it to analyze the semantic changes of the Mandarin Chinese discourse marker dangran (当然). It is discovered that dangran 's evolution is likely to be motivated by multiple rather than single pragmatic operations. Altogether 4 types of pragmatic operations are involved in dangran 's evolution. They exhibit synchronic cooperation and diachronic divisions of labor. These findings reveal the complexity of the pragmatic mechanisms underlying semantic changes. • Semantic changes are the byproducts of the contextualization of lexical meaning. • Multiple rather than single pragmatic operations are underlying semantic changes. • There is synchronic cooperation among these pragmatic operations. • These pragmatic operations also exhibit diachronic division of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]