A Figure-Ground Segregation Analysis Of Major Images In Wang's Poetry

For quite a long time, the images in Wang Wei's pastoral poetry have been the focus of literary criticism. Most of the researches overstress the emotional functions of images by considering the image as a narration means which performs as symbols and hints in the pastoral poetry from the historical and cultural perspective, but fail to investigate the cognitive functions of the images from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.The figure-ground segregation theory derives from psychology and is used by cognitive linguists to analyze the meaning of linguistic structures, that of prepositions in particular, and further to analyze the poetic images. The principle of figure-ground segregation is one of the basic cognitive principles according to which space is organized, but it can be applied to literary works, especially the poetic images as well, and it thus becomes a basic cognitive principle by which images are organized in poems.Based on previous studies, the major images extracted from Wang's pastoral poetry are reduced to four general ones: the moon image, the bird image, the void mountain image and the cloud image. For each image, their cognitive functions in the poems are represented in terms of the segregation theory. The analysis will be done on how the image interacts with other images in the same poem to form figure-ground segregation patterns and on Wang's holistic poetic layout of "Picturesque Embodiment in Poetic Composition".Through the cognitive interpretations of images in Wang's pastoral poetry, it is found that they do not only perform as symbols and hints, but also help readers understand the meaning of the images and the themes of the poems on the whole by activating the default schemata in readers' minds to segregate figures from grounds and interacting with other images in the same poetic texts.