A Study Of Meaning Construction Of Chinese Crosstalk: A Conceptual Blending Theory

Crosstalk is a type of folk art to cause people laugh by making jokes or funnyquestions. This subject has attracted attention of many linguistic researchers, whosestudies have provided us with a good understanding of it. Nevertheless, it has beenobserved that most of the studies are devoted to static description and analysis ofcrosstalk and few has tried to account for its meaning construction and the cognitivemechanism implied. Conceptual Blending Theory is an influential and importantcognitive linguistic theory. It concentrates primarily on on-line language production andinterpretation, which definitely belongs to a more dynamic approach.This thesis aims to analyze meaning construction process of Chinese crosstalk underthe frame of Conceptual Blending Theory. As a result, Conceptual Blending Theory willprovide us with a new perspective to approach Chinese crosstalk and ultimately with aprofound understanding.This thesis uses a corpus of nine pieces of Chinese crosstalk as data collected viaInternet. They are categorized and analyzed in accordance with four types of integrationnetwork which is developed by Fauconnier. The findings suggest that approachingChinese crosstalk from Conceptual Blending Theory not only enables us to achieve aprofound understanding of the subject, but also demonstrates that Conceptual BlendingTheory is extremely powerful in explaining language phenomena and enriches itsresearch scope. It is also found that the four basic types of integration networks displaydistinctive features. Furthermore, various people may give various explanations of thedata collected in the present study and there is more than one way to build an acceptableblend for crosstalk. The findings of the thesis will provide direction and inspiration forfuture studies in the area of Chinese crosstalk.