A CIT-based Study Of English Hypallage

As a supernormal language phenomenon, as well as a literary rhetoric device that can not be ignored, hypallage has attracted the attention of scholars of various fields for centuries. Although a number of scholars have studied hypallage from different perspectives, most of their studies mainly focused on hypallag's semantic and pragmatic features, psychological basis, aesthetic functions etc., and few of them have explored the process of meaning construction of hypallage and its mechanism of comprehension. In view of this, this thesis attempts to make a tentative study of the meaning construction of English hypallage in the light of Conceptual Integration Theory—a relatively new cognitive theory, which may enrich the previous studies.The qualitative method is adopted in this thesis. The collected data of English hypallage is analyzed in the light of Conceptual Integration Theory after selection and classification. Within the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory, the cross-space mapping types of English hypallage are firstly illustrated, and then the three subtypes of English hypallage: synaesthesia, empathy, and transferred epithet are analyzed and explained in detail by each giving a typical example. And the thesis tries to reveal the process of meaning construction and comprehension of English hypallage from the cognitive perspective.To summarize, this research is a significant attempt in the study of English hypallage. The author hopes that the thesis can broaden the application scope of Conceptual Integration Theory, and arouse the interest of other scholars to further study the meaning construction of English hypallage.