A Cognitive Interpretation Of Parodies In Internet News Headlines From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

As the mark of modern information society, Internet has been changing the style of human life, including the activity of reading news in daily life. News in the website begins to replace the news in papers, which makes reading more convenient. However, since the space in one page and readers'time are limited, the importance of news headlines is strengthened. Internet news headlines should express the information in several words vividly and accurately to attract readers'attention. One common and significant technique is parody. Parody is an imitation of the style of writing used by somebody else, designed to amuse. The application of parody into Internet news headlines greatly contributes to creating novelty meanings under particular context by usage of familiar language, and making news headlines much succinct, vivid and comprehensive.In this thesis, the Conceptual Integration Theory and Conceptual Integration Networks proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner are applied to the interpretation of the meaning construction of parody in Internet news headlines from the cognitive perspective. The thesis aims not only to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of this theory to some degree, but provide new cognitive perspective and insights for the research of parody.A large number of news headlines are selected from the websites as data for analysis. The application of the theory is to be fulfilled from the following aspects: input spaces, generic space, cross-space mapping, selective projection, blended space and emergent structure. Then according to the organizing frame and features of integration network, the data are mainly classified into three types:single-scope network, double-scope network and multiple-scope network.Another innovation of this thesis is applying the modified conceptual integration network to analyze the effects of parody in Internet news headline including positive rhetorical effects and negative effects, which expands the applicability of CIT. The strategies put forward afterwards are practical to guide the usage of parody.