Analyzing Fairy Tale Discourse: A Conceptual Integration Approach To Peter Pan

Fairy tales are a special part of literature, since most of their readers are children. The fairy tale Peter Pan was created in the transitional period of literature development in Europe, and the background and social factors of the novel make it different from other fairy tales. Numerous researchers have devoted great efforts to studying Peter Pan from various perspectives, such as psychology, sociology, education, literature and linguistics.As an important cognitive linguistic theory, conceptual integration theory has been found to have a wide range of applications, especially in discourse analysis. This thesis is a tentative and exploratory endeavor to study fairy tale discourse within the framework of this theory. The chief cognitive notion of the theory employed for the current research is emergent structure.The three ways to generate emergent structure are composition, completion, and elaboration. Considering the impracticability of analyzing the whole novel, this thesis has attempted to focus on:1) The conceptual integration analysis of some main characters;2) The conceptual integration analysis of the place Never Land;3) The conceptual integration analysis of some discourse selections.Through the analysis, the present thesis has made two major contributions. In terms of theory, this thesis has demonstrated how emergent structure is created through the emergence of new elements that are not in the original input spaces, emergent operations which are impossible in the original input spaces, and finally how mapping between elements in the input spaces is compressed within the blended space into uniqueness. In terms of practice, the present thesis has unveiled the mysteries that underlie the artistic charm of fairy tales and deepened our understanding of the particular literary genre of fairy tales in addition to throwing more light on this novel Peter Pan itself.