Studies Of Blending Mechanism Of Emergent Meaning Production

Linguists have put their efforts on meaning research all the time. Traditional ways to meaning focus on the representational, grammatical and structural way of meaning, especially the semiotic, rhetorical or structuralism theories of metaphors, puns and humors, involve objective factors, which do not probe the mechanism of the meaning production. With the development of science, and the change of society, more and more new things and new expressions emerge. Consequently, the limitations of traditional way in meaning research become salient. Consequently, researchers begin the cognitive study on meaning. Fauconnier (1997) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002) proposed the conceptual integration theory, which revel the on-ling meaning construction of natural language and the projection between mental spaces. Then propose the emergent meaning and emergent structure where the significance of on-line meaning construction resides in.With the conceptual integration theory, this paper analyses the data collected from English newspaper, magazine, website, which classified as novel metaphors, entrenched metaphors, puns and humors, using the cognitive inference and illustration to probe :1. What is emergent meaning?2. How is the emergent meaning produced?3. How the emergent meaning influence the comprehension of novel metaphors, entrenched metaphors and the effect of the puns and humors?Through the analysis of the typical examples, this paper finds that, emergent meaning is the creative meaning; it is produced through integration, which involves space mappings, motivation, and blending process, blending level, material anchor and culture. Emergent meaning is the virtual meaning of language in communication, it explore the mechanism of meaning production in metaphors, puns and humors.