The Analysis Of Humorous Microblogs From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Microblog, also known as Weibo, has entered common people’s life in recent years as a new tool for human’s communication. It changes the traditional communicative ways and provides people a new way to express their feelings and emotions. Among a large number of microblogs, there are a lot of humorous ones. Humorous microblgs have their unique features and various ways of expressing humor. The previous researches of microblog mainly focus on its mechanism of dissemination, its social roles and its profit modes for enterprises. There are few researches which are done from the perspective view of cognitive linguistics to explore its inner meaning construction.Conceptual blending theory is a newly emergent branch in cognitive linguistics, proposed initially by Fauconnier and Turner (1997). The theory has attracted more and more scholars’attention both abroad and at home because of its strong explanatory power. In a basic operation, there are four mental spaces:two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. The central concept of the conceptual blending theory is the conceptual integration network. In the conceptual integration, the frames and elements from input spaces are projected into the blended space selectively by three steps, namely, composition, completion and elaboration. Through this three steps, a new structure which is called emergent structure is formed. This theory has given many good explanations to many grammar phenomena, such as euphemism, pun and antiphrasis and etc.The integration network has four types:simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network, and double-scope network. The thesis reveals the inner mechanism of humorous meaning construction of humorous microblogs with the four types of integration network. The analysis materials are excerpted from the top10popular microbloggers’ microblogs of Sina Weibo. Through case study, on the one hand, the thesis demonstrates that CBT also has strong explanatory power in the study of the humorous microblogs. On the other hand, this thesis provides new perspective for the study of microblogs.