Cognitive Interpretation On The Comprehension Of Chinese Riddles: A Conceptual-blending Approach

The riddle is a cultural form peculiar to human beings, and it is also a universal linguistic phenomenon. The riddle studies both at home and abroad have a long history; however, most of them have been conducted from the aspects of folklore, rhetoric, history, and culture. Since the traditional researches often attach great importance to the objective observation and static description of the form and content of the riddle, they cannot provide full explanations on the concrete operation in riddle comprehension from a holistic view. Therefore, this thesis intends to apply a new cognitive approach, namely, the conceptual blending theory, to explore the backstage cognitive mechanism in riddle meaning construction in the hope of making up the shortcomings of the traditional theories.Conceptual integration is a kind of cognitive process which happens when we are thinking, especially when we do creative thinking. The conceptual blending theory and its conceptual integration network proposed by Fauconnier (1997) offer us a uniform theoretical framework for uncovering the cognitive activities hidden behind language understanding. This framework operates mainly on four mental spaces: two input spaces, one generic space, and one blended space. In conceptual integration, the two input spaces are connected with each other by cross-space mapping, and then structures in the inputs are selectively projected to the blended space in which the emergent structure occurs through composition, completion, and elaboration, thus, novel meaning is produced. The conceptual blending theory indicates that conceptual integration plays a very important role in the meaning construction of natural language. Accordingly, it is also taken as the internal operating mechanism of riddle comprehension in this thesis.The Chinese Shiwu riddle is chosen as the subject in the study. According to the characteristics of this kind of riddle, a new framework is put forward on the basis of the conceptual integration network model by adding a fifth mental space-the output space, through which the backstage operation in the meaning construction of the Chinese Shiwu riddle can be more explicitly presented. Meanwhile, the Shiwu riddle is reclassified into four types in terms of the four major integration networks, and the specific mental processes in the comprehension of each type of riddle are respectively explored in detail under the new framework so that we can have a better understanding about the riddle.It is proved in the study that conceptual integration is a ubiquitous cognitive phenomenon, and that the conceptual blending theory also has great explanatory power for unfolding the cognitive processes in riddle understanding. The combination of the conceptual blending theory and riddle comprehension provides both fields with a new perspective and enriches the studies in both riddle theory and cognitive science.