A Conceptual Integration Approach To The Imagery In Li Bai's Poetry

As a fundamental element of poetry, poetic imagery is the soul and life of poetry. The process of composing poetry is a process in which the poet searches for objective things as image and constructs imagery so as to express their subjective feelings vividly. Therefore, the study of Li Bai's poetry is concerned and emphasized by scholars. Li Bai is one of the most outstanding romantic poets in Tang Dynasty. His poetry is bold and unstrained in style, wonderful and fantastic in imagination, spontaneous and natural in language, thus the arrangement of imagery in his poetry is unique. Thus, the imagery in his poetry becomes the main study objects of many scholars. At present, domestic scholars study the imagery in Li Bai's poetry from the perspective of rhetoric, literature, aesthetics and translation, but scholars seldom study it from aspect of cognition, so we try to study the imagery in Li Bai's poetry in terms of cognition.The Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT), also called Conceptual Blending Theory, is a kind of cognitive theory developed from Mental Space Theory. It is also a theoretical framework used to explore the information blending in the process of meaning construction. Poetic imagery is the carrier poets use to express their emotion, which mean that the meaning construction of imagery will be involved in a series of mental cognitive activities. How mental activities are processed? In order to solve this problem, this thesis tries to study the meaning construction and cognitive process of imagery in Li Bai's poetry within the theoretical framework of CIT to provide a new viewpoint for the study of imagery in Li Bai's poetry.The significance of this research is to apply CIT to analyze the process of meaning construction and interpretation. Compared with the traditional method of literary appreciation, the research method of this thesis has its own advantages. It spatializes the conceptual category of human's minds and makes the contextual knowledge, background knowledge and encyclopedia knowledge applied in wider areas. Besides, during the process of blending and recombining information, an emergent structure with richer meaning will be produced.The CIT runs in a network with four spaces: two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. During the blending process, firstly elements and structures from the two input spaces set up the cross-mapping, and then they are projected onto the blended space selectively, finally through operations of composition, completion and elaboration,an emergent structure is formed in the blend. With the emergent structure, the psychological mechanism about the process of understanding the poetic imagery will be revealed. Therefore, this thesis tries to apply the theoretical framework with four spaces of the CIT to interpret the process of meaning construction by analyzing the emotional connotation of imagery in Li Bai's poetry in order to testify the interpretive power of the CIT to imagery in Li Bai's poetry. We hope that this thesis can help us understand the relevant mental activities when appreciating Li Bai's poetry and provide theoretical and practical foundation for abstract cognitive activities.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part gives an introduction of the topic, purpose, significance, methodology and organization of the thesis.The second part presents the previous domestic and overseas researches of the CIT and the Imagery. Through analyzing their achievements and limitations, we propose the topic of this study.The third part introduces the framework of CIT including a four-space blending model, the basic elements of blending operation, compression and relations, optimality principles and four kinds of blending networks.The fourth part mainly presents the definition and function of image and the classification of Li Bai's poetry.The fifth part is the core of this thesis. We use four cases to demonstrate the explanatory power of CIT to imagery in Li Bai's poetry in the way of case study to testify the theoretical and practical value of the CIT.The last part, as a brief summary, summarizes the findings and limitations of the study. Some suggestions or prospects are also given for future study.