A Cognitive Grammar Approach To The Translating Of Imagery

This study endeavors to illustrate how a Cognitive Grammar approach could prove useful in providing some insights and practical suggestions for meaning construction in the translation process, especially for the analysis and transfer of imagery. Following the cognitivist view, this study maintains that meaning is conceptualization, which is embodied, subjective, encyclopedic in nature, and deeply rooted in language- and culture-specific cognitive models. The principle of language iconicity entails that linguistic structures correspond to conceptual structures and that all linguistic structures are cognitively motivated. Differences in grammatical forms thus imply differences in conceptual structures. The full value of a linguistic expression is, therefore, a function both of its conceptual content and of how this content is structured or construed. The ways of construal in meaning construction constistute what we mean by"imagey"in this study. The cognitive approach treats grammar as imagery imposed on the conceptual content, representing the relative prominence of elements, their schematicity or specificity, and the point of view adopted. In this light, we suggest that translation should be practised and evaluated on the conceptual level, as a cognitive activity of depicting in one language the conceived situation that is activated by a text in another language. The transfer of the conceived situation consists in capturing both the conceptual content and its imagery.Incorporating Langcker's theory of Cognitive Grammar with Fillmore's concept of frames and Lakoff and Johnson's model of conceptual metaphor, this thesis proposes an integrated theorectical framework for a description of the translation process in cognitive terms, with a special focus on the translating of imagery. Imagery conveyed by grammar is analyzed by means of the various dimensions of scene construal (profiling, specificity, prominence, and perspective) as identified by Langacker, while imagery generally associated with the so-called"figurative"language is discussed in terms of metaphorical forcefulness, congruence, exuberance, and cultural models, with such phenomena as metaphor and metonymy regarded as fundamental cognitive mechanisms for language and thought.The study then carries out an examination of the differences in conceptual organization between English and Chinese. The widely discussed similarities and especially divergences between the two languages, with the consequent shifts of imagery in terms of scene construal during the translation process, are re-considered within the proposed theoretical framework and many topics that were traditionally dealt with as linguistic phenomena are illuminated in a new, cognitive light.