Cognitive Interpretation Of Meaning By Means Of Cognitive Integration Theory

Comprehension of language meaning is always an important, old but alive subject in the linguistic research and paid attention to by so many fields as philosophy, psychology and linguistics. However, they each have their own view on how to study language meaning, and disagree with each other. There are mainly two schools: objectivism and experientialism. The former holds that language meaning exists in the reality world, and that language is only symbols expressing reality. Thus, understanding language is establishing the relationship between the symbols of language and the reality world, independent of human beings. On the contrary, the latter, represented by the contemporary cognitive linguists whose research has become the main trend, claims that meaning is not a kind of objective meaning, which separates itself from the mind, but exists in a complex cognitive activity, and is a product of the interaction between mind and reality. The process of meaning comprehension is a process of cognition.This paper first gives a detailed introduction to a new cognitive theory--conceptual integration theory about meaning construction, and then applies it to the interpretation of some common complicated phenomena, such as figures of speech, compounds, grammatical structures and discourse, whose understandings are inseparable from mappings between mental spaces and their blending. The great power of this theory to explain so many phenomena indicates that conceptual integration is a very common cognitive activity, thus opening a wide prospective for meaning construction.Conceptual integration, as a general cognitive mechanism, finds its wide application in various cognitive fields, with the study of language comprehension an important part of it. However, although the theory has many indisputable and convincing advantages, as a newly developed theory, it cannot avoid some disadvantages, requiring further improvement.Finally, it is worth pointing out that conceptual integration theory is still a theory with powerful potential in that it reveals a whole new angle for cognitive research. This is also the author's starting point to study the theory.