Mental Space Theory And Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding (MIS) is a phenomenon that often takes place in language communication. The research of MIS can help us get a better idea about the law of language communication and make communication run more smoothly.Mental space theory is an important constituent of cognitive linguistics. It mainly focuses on people's cognitive activities in meaning construction. Conceptual blending/integration theory is a further development of mental space theory, which is a great achievement in mental space research. Mental space theory was initiated by Fauconnier in 1985, and has drawn much attention from scholars of various fields.Through looking over previous studies on MIS and mental space theory we find that very few researchers have undertaken the research of MIS from the perspective of mental space theory. This dissertation carries out an explorative study on this topic, intending to trace some cognitive origins of MIS and discuss the explanatory power of mental space theory to MIS.Basing on the feasibility research, we assume that two cognitive origins of MIS can be traced under the conceptual blending mode: Opacity of information contained in input space 1 provided by the speaker, and difference of the content of the two input spaces constructed by the speaker and the hearer respectively.The hypothesis is proved by an elaborated text analysis of various MIS examples collected from daily conversation, novels, plays, and other scholars'studies within the framework of mental space theory. The text analysis tells that mental space theory can be a new perspective to MIS study. It can explain the causes of MIS by revealing the cognitive process of MIS generation, which shows great explanatory power to MIS. The new perspective helps us explore the causes of MIS in a deeper and more systematic manner, which calls for further study on this issue.