Cognitive Interpretation Of The Nursery Rhymes By Means Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Nursery rhyme or children's song means simple verse customary said, recited or sung to small children. It is not only a literary form but also the composition of children literature. It served as the earliest educational means to little babies. Children are nurtured by nursery rhymes—the melodious and harmonious cradlesongs from their childhood. Nursery rhymes bring children laughter of joy, make them know the good and the evil in the world, and tell them how to behave themselves. It is nursery rhymes that accompany children's growth and influence their life deeply. Therefore, it is necessary to make a study of nursery rhymes and produce more and better nursery rhymes for children.Traditional nursery rhyme theories mainly focus on the non-cognitive linguistic fields, for example, the perspectives of sociology, physiology, aesthetics, folklore, pedagogy, rhetoric, failing to give an overall account of the production and interpretation of nursery rhymes. Therefore, a cognitive approach to nursery rhymes is adopted for analysis within the framework of conceptual blending theory and its conceptual integration network.Fauconnier (1997) proposes the conceptual blending theory and conceptual integration network based on the mental space theory. In the network model of conceptual integration, four mental spaces are advanced (input 1, input 2, generic space, blended space) which can interrelate and mirror each other through cross-space mapping and selective projection, finally, the blended space occurs and the emergent structure is engendered by composition, pattern completion and elaboration. The whole process makes the meaning produced. The conceptual blending theory aims to show us the cognitive iceberg behind the on-line meaning construction of any discourse.In this thesis, the nursery rhymes are taken as the subject and they are categorized into four types from the cognitive level and investigated respectively in four integration network models so that the invisible, unconscious and dynamic cognitive operation in the on-line meaning construction of nursery rhymes are made explicit. In this way, the study can further prove that conceptual integration is a universal cognitive operation and it can be verified that the mental process of nursery rhyme meaning construction can be illustrated from the cognitive aspect by applying the conceptual blending theory, which can provide an alternative perspective for the study on the nursery rhymes. Furthermore, the cognitive classification of nursery rhymes in the study differs from the traditional one in terms of form and content, which may also contribute to the nursery rhymes study.