A RBT Study Of Chinese Zhiwu Riddles

Riddle, cherished by people for thousands of years, has been one of the treasures in Chinese culture. With brief and vivid form, it is close to our daily life and rich in folk culture, accessible to both highbrows and lowbrows. This word game is designed according to the cognitive characteristics of humans, whose solution always associates with metaphorical thinking. Although with a long history, research on riddles is, for the most part, simply about the origin, naming, content, classification, and rhetoric devices of the riddles. Therefore, these traditional studies mostly focus on objective observations and static descriptions of the forms and contents of riddles. Recently, some scholars have investigated the riddles from the fields of psychology, metaphor, Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory respectively, but they fail to provide a detailed explanation for the concrete operation in riddles comprehension from a holistic view.This study has drawn on the advantages of various theories and tried to innovate constantly on the base of the previous research. The author has established a tentative cognitive model concerning Chinese riddles understanding with the combination of Relevance Theory (thereafter abbreviated as RT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (thereafter abbreviated as CBT), and from the standpoint of metaphor.Chinese Zhiwu Riddle (with plants as Midi) is chosen as the subject of the study. In accordance with the features of this kind of riddle, a new model is introduced based on the combination of RT and CBT. The new model has three input spaces: input spaceⅠ—context, input spaceⅡ—Mimian and input spaceⅢ—Mimu. Under the guidance of RT, the riddle guesser continuously constructs, chooses and adjusts contextual assumption, which facilitates to the mapping of the proper corresponding features among the three input spaces. The matching frames and entities are projected into the blending space in order to gain the precise understanding of Chinese Zhiwu Riddle.The study has shown that the newly built RT-CBT model for riddle comprehension has great explanation power for the internal cognitive mechanism of riddle understanding process, which also develops a brand new way for riddles research.