A Cognitive Semantic Study On English N+N Compounds From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

For those who learn English as a second language, N+N compounds constitute a hurdle hard to jump. It is because those compounds reflect laconicism in form and expression on one hand, but the complex process of meaning construction on the other. Recently, English N+N compounds gradually become one focus of contemporary linguistic research. The scholars both at home and abroad make large sums of researches on them from varieties of angles. The previous studies mainly focus on analyzing the modes of formation of compounds and investigating the syntactic and semantic relations between constituents. The efforts of previous linguists have fully showed the unpredictability and apparently unlimited semantic flexibility of the English N+N compounds, without illustrating and revealing meaning construction mechanisms which show the meaning construction dynamically in detail.The thesis tries to explore the meaning construction mechanism in English N+N compounds from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. On one hand, it attempts to confirm that conceptual integration is a common cognitive activity with powerful cognitive illustration. On the other hand, it tries to prove that English N+N compounds can be explained through the conceptual integration theory from the cognitive perspective in order to provide a new research perspective on the interpretation of English N+N compounds.Since Fauconnier put forward the mental space theory in1985, conceptual integration theory has developed maturely. As a kind of cognitive process, conceptual integration plays a significant role in constructing word meaning and provides us a unified theoretical framework for analyzing word compounds. The thesis tries to construct the meaning of five types of English N+N compounds which are relational English N+N compounds, conjunctive English N+N compounds, property-mapping English N+N compounds, hybrid English N+N compounds and blended English N+N compounds. And they are categorized by semantic relations based on five conceptual integration networks in conceptual integration theory. And then it attempts to view the on-line meaning construction of the selected typical cases in English N+N compounds by careful screening, categorizing, analyzing and making a qualitative analysis in order to account for the cognitive mechanism behind the semantic meaning of N+N compounds in English.This thesis makes a tentative study of English N+N compounds from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. And it has dual meaning both theoretical and practically. On the one hand, it confirms the powerful explanation of the conceptual integration theory as the theoretical framework for analyzing English N+N compounds, enriching its research scope. On the other hand, it enriches the study of English N+N compounds. It is also of great help to learn English vocabulary. And it also has practical meaning in English vocabulary teaching and smart machine translating.