Puns And Counterpart Correspondence

Puns, as a kind of skillful language device, were once the most heatedly discussed topics in rhetoric. The traditional research of pun mainly focuses on their classifications, properties, rhetorical functions, expressive effects, and the comparison between puns in Chinese and English, which can not provide a solid explanation to the underlying motivations in the generation of pun. The present research intends to make a cognitive explanation of the production mechanism of pun. We hold that the cognitive abilities concerning language use share similar characteristics with the cognitive principles embodied in language and language use. With this belief as a guideline, this paper provides a workable account for the underlying mechanism of pun production.Punning phenomenon is a way in which the communicator expresses two or more communicative intentions with one and the same linguistic expression. In the construction of a pun, a process is necessarily involved in which the punster tries to make use of the basic characteristics displayed in the process of mental model establishment in listeners'interpretation of linguistic expressions. In the pun-constructing process, the punster first seeks for suitable linguistic forms dependent upon the autonomous communicative intentional attitude, and then he makes efforts to find a counterpart expression as the hinge to link two or more possible worlds to make his expression possess a potential for two or more ways of interpretation. The process described above is a necessary consequence of the co-operation of characteristics of mental model establishment depicted in"Mental Model based research paradigm"and the theory of counterpart correspondence in possible world theories.On the basis of abovementioned theories, we hold that:1) The meanings of a pun, here a two-way pun, relate respectively to two possible worlds which interconnect with each other by relation of counterpart correspondence.2) These two possible worlds hinges each other by similarity, thus makes these two possible worlds in relation of counterpart correspondence. 3) In a two-way pun, we always take the meaning in actual world as its base meaning. The other meaning is derived from the base meaning by the counterpart correspondence relation that set between the possible world and actual world. We call this derived meaning as the context meaning of pun.4) The intention of the punster is the trigger to construct the possible worlds.By applying the working framework of pun, we finally come to the following findings:1) The production of punning expressions are motivated by the intention (intentional attitude and intentional content) especially the intentional attitude such as humor, economy, ambiguity, novelty, indirect and so on. The punster's intentional content is to convey multiple meanings, which is the autonomous element of pun production.2) The specific characteristics of pun, i.e. semantic ambiguity and condensation of form, decide the key procedure of pun production is the merger of the multiple meanings into a hinge, by setting up the counterpart correspondence relations in different possible worlds. The merger process is mainly realized under the manipulation of knowledge structure of Mental Models in our mind through using our cognitive ability of association, imagination, and secret change of definition to detect the cross-world similarity relations of the multiple meanings of pun in sound, form and structure.3) With the guidance of intention, the punster derives the hinge into the punning expression in the actual world. The punning expression can convey the multiple meanings which the punster intends to express, and it is the dependency element which comes from the punster's intentional attitude as its corresponding autonomous element.