Cognitive Meaning Construction In Emily Dickinson's Poems

Since Emily Dickinson's poems were first published in 1890, critical response to her works has been both abundant and unceasing. Continuous publication of her poems and manuscripts has been spurred by vigorous scholarly inquiry and public interest in both her poetry and her life. Scholars and critics attempt to go into Dickinson's world from different perspectives, literary or linguistic, especially cognitive linguistic, or combining both together.The study of counterfactuals has been proliferated in recent years as one of the most dynamic and exciting theoretical domains. Fauconnier and Turner, as leading cognitive linguists, depart from the traditional study of counterfactuals and steer the study into the cognitive domain by claiming that understanding counterfactuals necessitates the conceptual blending under work.In this thesis, two of Dickinson's famous poems are selected for cognitive linguistic analysis. By analyzing counterfactuals in the selected poems, the present author attempts to reveal the cognitive process on the part of readers within the framework of conceptual blending theory in interpreting Dickinson's poems and as a corollary, to explore how Dickinson uses her imagination to create a coherent conceptualization that is realized by metaphors and schemata. One implication of the literary analyses from the cognitive linguistic perspective is that counterfactuals, which are constructed by readers, play an important role in deepening and extending our understanding of literary texts.