A Cognitive Approach To Children Fairy Tales

Fairy tale is a unique genre of literature. It is unique in that most of its readers are children. This thesis is a tentative and original endeavor to study children fairy tales from the cognitive point of view whose perspectives include cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. Research literature and resources on theories like children cognitive development, animistic thinking, conceptual metaphors, metaphoric thinking, categorization, conceptual integration and possible world contribute to the discussions and findings in this thesis.Researchers in the field of cognitive science (Piaget 1929; Carey 1985; Inagaki and Hatano 1987; 1991; 2004; Hatano 1999) agree that in childhood animistic thinking is often seen in children. The current study from the cognitive approach to children fairy tales identifies this claim of animistic thinking in childhood, thus the hypothesis that fairy tales'cognitive information accords with the child's own cognitive reality is put forward. From the cognitive linguistic point of view, metaphoric thinking characterizes fairy tales. Metaphoric thinking and animistic thinking enable the fuzzy boundaries of categories in fairy tales. All these constitute a possible world in fairy tales. And this possible world along with metaphoric thinking and animistic thinking is conceptualized as childhood spirit which is claimed in this thesis as the nature of fairy tales.Chapter I introduces the origin of the current study and the structure of this thesis, and serves as the thesis statement.Chapter II defines fairy tales and classifies them, and a literature review on the study of fairy tales is presented.Chapter III discusses fairy tales from a cognitive science view. Findings from the analysis of animistic thinking in fairy tales reveal a human-to-nonhuman-projection thinking which falls into four kinds of projections: people-to-animal, people-to-plant, people-to-inanimate object and implicit people-to-animate-or-inanimate. Thus the hypothesis that fairy tales'cognitive information accords with the child's own cognitive reality is established.Chapter IV studies fairy tales from a cognitive linguistic view by analyzing fairy tales'conceptual metaphors, categories, categorization and conceptual integration. Findings suggest that conceptual metaphors are pervasive in fairy tales. Among these metaphors, PHYSICAL ENTITY IS PERSON and PERSON IS PHYSICAL ENTITY are two important ones.Conceptual metaphors in fairy tales are systematic and they constitute a cognitive network.