（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）概念整合——英文新闻标题的认知研究.pdf

iii 摘摘 要要 本论文运用 fauconnier 和 turner 等人提出的概念整合理论从认知的层面 上对英语新闻标题的意义建构进行分析， 旨在运用这一理论阐释英语新闻标题意 义建构的认知机制，为新闻标题的研究提供一种新的研究角度和方法。 概念整合理论具有完整的框架结构， 遵循一套完整灵活的运作机制。它的 基本运作需要四个心理空间： 两个输入空间， 一个类属空间和一个整合空间。 整 合中两个输入空间中的成分被有选择地投射到整合空间。通过组合、完善和阐释 的过程，生成输入空间所没有地新结构。运用这一理论可以解释人们理解新闻标 题时内在的心理运作机制， 从而为从认知角度诠释新闻标题提供了一个新的可能 性。 全文由四部分组成。 第一部分简要介绍本文研究的方向和基本组成部分。 第二部是对概念整合理论的介绍，包括概念整合网络，类型以及优化原则。这一 部分还回顾了概念整合理论与隐喻研究的关系。 第三部分运用概念整合理论对英 语新闻标题进行分析，是全文的核心。分析从英语新闻标题的四个层面展开，隐 喻层面，语言形式层面，谚语引用层面和图片功能层面。通过个案分析，从认知 角度说明了英文新闻标题的意义建构过程。最后对全文进行概括总结，指出不足 之处以及对今后研究的启发。 关键词关键词：概念整合；英语新闻标题；意义建构 ii abstract this dissertation adopts a cognitive approach to the comprehension of english news headlines within the framework of conceptual integration theory which is proposed by gilles fauconnier and mark turner as a cognitive operation and serves a variety of cognitive purposes. this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the mental cognitive meaning construction process and offer an alternative perspective on the study of english news headlines. conceptual integration has complete networks, which function independently according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. the basic operation comprises four mental spaces: two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. in blending, structures from input spaces are selectively projected to a separate “blended space”. through composition, completion and elaboration, the blend develops structures that are not provided by the inputs. with this theory, the hidden cognitive mechanism involved in the interpretation of news headlines can be revealed. it offers an exciting possibility for cognitive interpretation of news headlines. the whole dissertation is made up of four parts. chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the general framework of the study. in chapter 2, conceptual integration theory is exposited with examples, including the network model and four kinds of sub networks. its relationship with metaphor study is also reviewed in this part. chapter 3 is the heart of the whole study. the analyses are demonstrated with case study from four aspects: metaphorical expression, linguistic structure, allusion and picture which concern the english news headlines. the analyses prove that conceptual blending theory is a mighty explanatory theory in cognitive interpretation of english news headlines. the last chapter is a conclusion of the whole thesis in which limitations of the study are pointed. keywords: conceptual blending theory； english news headline； meaning construction 1 附件四附件四 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下， 独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外，本 论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的作品成果。 对本 文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。 本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名：吕小玉吕小玉 日期： 年 月 日 2 附件五附件五 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定， 同意学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版， 允许论文被查阅和借阅。 本人授权上海交通大学可以将本学位论文的 全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫 描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文。 保密保密，在 年解密后适用本授权书。 本学位论文属于 不保密 不保密。 （请在以上方框内打“”） 学位论文作者签名：吕小玉吕小玉 指导教师签名：童剑平童剑平 日期： 年 月 日 日期： 年 月 日 i acknowledgements i would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, associate professor tong jianping, who has helped me a lot in the writing of this dissertation with her deep insights and great patience, and from whom i benefit a lot in the study of linguistics. i am also indebted to the scholars mentioned in the references, especially to gilles fauconnier whose remarks about the blending theory spark my interest in cognitive linguistics and then leads to this dissertation. i am grateful to all my friends who have helped and encouraged me in my study for ma, especially to zhang ailing who has helped me borrow some important books from fudan university library and offered me some suggestions, and to han huiying with whom i often have a lot of discussion. finally, my special thanks goes to all my friend luan yimin and all others with whom i study and discuss together during my ma study at shanghai jiao tong university. 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter 1 introduction a piece of news usually is composed of three parts, namely a headline, a lead and a body. among them, the headlines are described as eyes of news, for as the very first part of a piece of news, it guides the reader to see the panorama of the whole news story. therefore, headlines are of vital importance to news composers and editors, for they offer readers the gist of news and thus grasping readers attention and interest. as far as the reader is concerned, a decision of reading the whole news or not is mainly based on their understanding of the information or the meanings through the headline. for the composers of the news, on the other hand, they have to consider expressing their thoughts briefly and succinctly because of the space limitation. when composing a headline, conscious of it or not, a news writer, in fact is just doing the job of carefully sewing his thoughts in headlines. these thoughts become meanings of a headline. to compose a headline, a composer needs all-round thinking about meaning conveying. he/she has to employ all kinds of devices, linguistic and non-linguistic, to transmit his exact thoughts and information to the readers. for both readers and writers, one thing is common: meaning is constructed in a single piece of headline. then how to interpret the meaning construction of english news headlines? one answer may lie in cognitive linguistics which holds a view of meaning as follow: meaning is grounded in the shared human experience of bodily existence and based on conventionalized conceptual structures (saeed, 2000: 301). according to gilles fauconnier, who originally proposes mental space theory and conceptual integration theory, language only serves as a powerful means of prompting dynamic on-line meaning constructions; meaning construction refers to the high-level, complex mental operations that apply within and across domains when we think, act, or communicate. back to the year of 1994, fauconnier put forward the mental space theory, which organizes the processes that take place behind our thinking and talking. 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 2 based on the mental space theory, fauconnier in 1997 develops conceptual integration theory (or conceptual blending theory or blending theory). this theory offers a four-space network to explain the on-line meaning construction process. mental spaces can be projected, changed, and tracked as dynamic and continuous activity in discourse. elements and partial structure from input spaces can be blended into new, original, and creatively constructed spaces. blending processes are particularly useful in helping us analyze the creative transformation of meaning in linguistic field as well as other fields like cartoon and mathematics. this is particularly valuable in case of news headlines which usually result from the news writers careful arrangement of words, pictures, syntactic structures, and rhetoric devices and so on. with this theory, we can tell how news composers weave the information and his thoughts in news headlines and how the various devices such as syntactic structure, phrases, figurative device, pictures, and punctuation are employed to construct the meaning, especially the on-line, local meaning in a specific news context. this thesis seeks to explore the process of meaning construction in english news headlines within the framework of conceptual integration theory. 1.1 purpose of the study since fauconniers advocacy that conceptual integration plays a significant role in many areas of cognition, the blending theory have been widely employed to analyze various linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena by scholars both at home and abroad. however, most of the present researches concerning news headlines highlight the pragmatic and stylistic aspects. few of them figure out the mental operations about news headlines, that is how to interpret the meaning construction of news headlines. therefore, this thesis stresses the interpretation of meaning construction in english news headlines within the framework of conceptual integration theory. through the demonstration of conceptual integration evoked in metaphorical expressions, linguistic structures, allusions and picture, the hidden mystery of cognitive operation for comprehending english news headlines is exposed, with the 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 3 aim of assisting the understanding of the abstract blending theory and news headline interpretation in a dynamic way. the purposes of the study are summarized as follows: 1) to enrich news headline study in china from the perspective of cognitive linguistics 2) to reveal the hidden cognitive process of conceptual blending embedded in english news headlines 3) to specify, by examining news headline, the abstract cognitive process of the blending, thus facilitating a better understanding of the blending theory 1.2 a general outline of the thesis conceptual blending is a basic mental operation. it plays a role in grammar, semantics, discourse, meaning, visual representation, mathematics, jokes, cartoons, and poetry (turner rather, language is like a recipe for constructing meaning, a recipe which relies on a lot of independent cognitive activities. according to this view, when we study linguistic meaning we are studying the way that language provides a patchy and partial trigger for a series of complex cognitive procedures (saeed, 2004: 319). therefore, mental space theory focuses on the cognitive processes triggered during discourse by linguistic structures. the central idea is that when we are involved in using language, for example in conversation, we are continually constructing domains, so that if we talk about, say, shakespeares play julius caesar, we might maintain several relevant domains, or mental spaces. one domain is the world of the play, while another might be the real world, where julius caesar is a historical figure. mental space theory, though at beginning, is utilized to answer questions about the indirect reference and referential opacity (fauconnier, 1994), later this theory has been proved to be useful to explain various linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena like math, gesture, music and creative design. with the development of mental space theory, the key notion conceptual integration is introduced by fauconnier (1997) in mapping in thought and language. in this book, fauconnier unfolds his four-space model by which he argues that the 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 5 on-line meaning of the natural languages can be constructed. during the following couple years, fauconnier makes his efforts constantly, endeavoring to optimize this theory. in their current study of cognitive semantics, fauconnier and turner show that “projection typically involves conceptual integration” (fauconnier others are about the application or utilization of the theory, such as using this theory to analyze diverse linguistic phenomena (turner su wang, 2001; zhu sometimes only one element in one input without a counterpart gets projected to the blend. whats more, input spaces can be providers of projections to the blend and receivers of projections back from the blend. as we project to a blend, we are also working on the entire network, and we may recruit new structure to the inputs to make it possible for further projection to the blend. 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 9 integration process: there are three operations involved in constructing the blend: composition, completion and elaboration. it is the most straightforward process to compose elements selectively projected from the inputs into the blend, providing relations that do not exit in the separate inputs. counterparts from the inputs may be fused in the blend or brought into the blend as separate entities. moreover, the representations resulting from the composition process may or may not be realistic when the imagination is triggered. in the monk example, the two days and traveling paths are fused into on in the blend, but the two monks from the inputs remain distinct entities. composed structure is completed with other structures which are recruited from background knowledge and conceptual structure. the recruitment of such knowledge is usually invisible and unconscious, evoked when structures are projected from the input spaces to match information in the long-term memory. with the evoked specific or general encyclopedic information, a minimal composition in the blend can be extensively completed by a larger conventional pattern. pattern completion is the most fundamental kind of recruitment and a source of emergent content in the blend. in the monk example, the structure achieved through composition is completed by the scenario of two people walking toward each other, which yields an encounter elaboration develops the blend through imaginative mental simulation according to principles and logic in the blend. the process of completion may bring some of these principles to the blend. continued dynamic completion can recruit new principles and logic during elaboration. new principles and logic may arise through elaboration itself. for example, the monks might have discussion about buddhism or one of them may invite the other to have a rest with him. blended space can become extremely elaborated. composition, completion and elaboration lead to a new structure in the blendemergent structure which is not copied from the inputs. with the emergent structure, conceptual integration theory can account for the phenomena which the two-space model fails to address explicitly. as a result of the three integrating process, namely composition, completion and 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 10 elaboration, a new structure emerges in blend and this structure is called emergent structure which exists in neither of the input spaces. in figure 1, the square inside the blend represents emergent structure. 2.3 types of integration network as fauconnier the other is the degree to which each of the inputs provides the basis for the framing in the blend. and a continuum is found along these dimensions. along this continuum, some prototypes stand out. the following is a brief description of four important prototypes along this gradient: single framing network, frame networks, one-sided networks, and two-sided networks. 2.3.1 single framing network briefly, a single framing network has an abstract frame as one input and as the other input a specific situation that has no organizing frame at all for the purpose of the integration, and so no potential for competition with the organizing frame of the first input. for example, sally is the daughter of paul has the kinship frame daughter-ego as one input and as the other input a specific situation containing nothing but sally and paul. in the blend, sally is framed as daughter and paul is framed as ego. there is crucial emergent structure in this blend: the blend has a role daughter of paul that is unavailable from either input. moreover, the ego role in the kinship input is specified in the blend to be a father rather than a mother. 2.3.2 frame network a frame network is a conceptual integration network in which all spaces, inputs, generic, and blend, share topology given by an organizing frame. an organizing frame for a mental space is a frame that specifies the nature of the relevant activity, events, and participants. an abstract frame like competition is not an organizing 上海交通大学硕士学位论文 11 frame, because it does not specify a cognitively representable type of activity and event structure. typically, in a frame network, the common frame inheres in the more elaborate frame in the blend. an organizing frame provides a set of organizing relations among the elements in the space. when two spaces share the same organizing frame, they share the corresponding topology1 and so can easily be put into correspondence. establishing a cross-space between inputs is straightforward when they share the same organizing frame. for example, a modern catamaran great america ii, sailing from san francisco to boston in 1993, is being compared to a clipper, northern light, that made the same run back in 1853. a few days before the catamaran reached boston, observers were able to say: at this point, great american ii is 4.5 days ahead of northern light. in this case, the shared organizing frame is boat sailing along an ocean course which inheres in the more elaborate frame in the blend of sailboats racing along an ocean course. while spaces in a frame network share topology at the level of an organizing frame, they may differ at a more specific level. in the boat race network, there are two elements that fit the role boat in the organizing frame and so have identical topology at frame level. more specific relations, however, define finer topologies that often differ. for example, in the race network, one of the elements fits the more specific frame nineteenth-century clipper on a freight run and the other fits the more specific frame late-twentieth-century exotic catamaran on a speed run. the two more specific frames are different, and so the topologies are different at the specific level. there will also in both input spaces be incidental topology which does not have to be included or specified, given the organizing frame. for example, it may be fully part of the actual ocean voyages that dolphins escort the boats and that they pass by a certain uncharted island, but these are not assigned a role in the organizing frame. in 1 fauconnier and turner (1998: 163) defines it as one of th