The Role of Cognitive Environment in the Construction and Comprehension of Lexical Meaning

The construction and comprehension of lexical meaning is a process of searching and establishing the optimal relevance between cognitive environment and lexical meaning.So the cognitive environment plays a very important role in it.Based on the Relevance Theory,this paper discusses how to make use of cognitive environment to construct and understand the lexical meaning by means of pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening.After the discussion,the paper also gives some suggestions about the ways of teaching and learning English vocabulary,hoping that'll help.