Idealized Cognitive Model Analysis In Poetry Coherence

In this thesis, we tentatively answer two questions: (1) What are the cohesive devices and the features of coherence in Shu Ting's poetry from the point of ICM? (2) What's the contribution of this study to the production and appreciation of poems? This thesis attempts to analyze Shu Ting's lyrics under the guidance of Idealized Cognitive Model. It will show us how the thematic and aesthetic significance of Shu Ting's lyrics is created through coherence, and presents the cognitive processes in appreciating and understanding the lyrics. And qualitative research approach is taken to explore the explanatory power of ICM for coherence analysis. It also pays much attention to the study of readers'background knowledge in cognitive world and mental experience used when they read and interpret poetic discourses.Major findings include: Firstly, propositional meanings are actually denotative meanings. The realization of propositional coherence depends on conceptual activations and people's experience of the real world. On one hand, given propositional information will be bridged when one word activates micro cognitive world. On the other hand, a poetic theme could be considered as a proposition and activated by ICM to construct a whole coherent unit in a poem.Secondly, as for image coherence, poets expect readers to receive maximum text information. So they tend to choose typical, representative and relevant images to ensure successful expression of intention and make text coherent. The characteristics of relevance and creativity are clearly demonstrated in this part. However, readers may infer different imageries from the same image. In this situation, the prototypic effectiveness of ICM will stand one or two imageries out and bridge close relationship among lexical and thematic information.Thirdly, metaphor and metonymy frequently appear in poetry. According to Lakoff's metaphoric mapping and metonymic mapping structures, the coherence of poetic information relies on mappings from one domain to another or just inside one domain. The creativity of poetry is mainly displayed in these two models.Finally, through the analysis of Shu Ting's poems the explanatory power of ICM is testified. These cases present the working mechanism of ICM in coherent analysis of poetic text. It is valuable to study poetic text coherence from a new perspective and help readers build up fresh thinking models to understand the meanings and aesthetic value of poems.From the cognitive perspective, the author points out that ICM is not only applicable to analyze Shu Ting's lyrics, but will help the readers appreciate semantic coherence in other modern Chinese lyric poems as well.