A Cognitive Study Of Verbal Poetic Image

This thesis intends to explore the nature of verbal poetic images through analyzing the cognitive classifications and cognitive models of them to draw the conclusion that poetic language and poetic images can be analyzed and that poetic text yields to cognitive studies. This leads to a deep hermeneutic understanding of a poetic text.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, this paper consists of three chapters. In the part of the introduction, the history of poetics and the existing poetic studies are generally explained. Cognitive poetics appeared as the new trend of linguistics challenging the stereotype of old poetics.In Chapter One, the literature of image poetics has been reviewed, which has been explored from the traditional perspectives. The advantage of them is that they all have fully explained the function and formation of verbal poetic images , but the disadvantage of them is that they can not lead to the deep understanding of poetic images and poetic texts.New cognitive poetics challenged the existing studies of poetry. It prompted a cognitive way that a verbal poetic image and poetic texts can be analyzed. In this way the nature of verbal poetic images can be more easily found out, but the new way has not been exemplified enough.In Chapter Two, at first, the relation between the image and poetry is fully explained to help the reader map the importance of verbal poetic images from all perspectives. It certainly can be said that an image in poetry is a picture made out of words, and that a poem may itself be an image composed of a multiplicity of images. Secondly, the definition and origin of poetic images are reviewed to find out the close relation between the verbal poetic image and cognitive organs. Therefore, it can be said that understanding poetry is picking up the image in it and finding out what the image implies. The process of understanding poetry relates to our cognition and minds considerably. Now that the image is the key factor of understanding a poem, it is also worthwhile researching into the cognitive and linguistic features of poetic imagery.In Chapter Three, cognitive classifications of poetic images are investigated and are fully discussed. The verbal poetic images have been used to classified into farewell images, homesickness images, sadness images, emotion images, love images, war images and leisure images according to their function. They can be also divided into compound images, single images and overlapping images according to their formation. But theses two methods of classification are not very helpful for the reader to get the insight into the verbal poetic images and they have not been exemplified enough with examples of both Chinese and western poetry.In this thesis, verbal poetic iamges are classified into visual image, gustatory image, tactile image, auditory image, kinesthetic image, olfactory image and synaesthesia according to the relation between the image and cognitive organs. These new classifications are very helpful to understanding the eideticness of poetic images.In Chapter Four, the cognitive mechanism of various images in poetry are exemplified. Cognitive mechanism of a verbal poetic image is a construal which combines various image schemas, representing three basic elements: the referent concept, the vehicle concept associated with the referent, the ground concept which exhibits the feature shared by the referent and vehicle. The ground concept is established with regard to the context in which an image occurs.It also includes mental spaces of the concepts which constitute the image space of the poetic text and the connectors which show the paths of cognitive mappings across different input domains."With the help of archetypal concepts found in poetry, some cognitive mechanism of poetic image is illustrated as the image schemas. This may help a lot to find out the discrete nature of verbal poetic images and lead to a deep hermeneutic understanding of a poetic text.Cognitive studies challenged the existing poetic research and prompted the way the verbal images and semantics of poetic texts can be analyzed.