| We live in an Information Era characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. As one of the indispensible means in information transmission, news in foreign languages provides ESL learners and teachers a good opportunity to learn language and to know the outside world. Parody, as one of the most active figures of speech in English, is more and more widely employed in English news, in particular news headlines, creating novel and humorous, satirical and sarcastic pragmatic effects. However, news is not only the carrier of information but also a form of communication between news journalists and readers. As a language phenomenon and an act of verbal communication, parody is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive activity. Thus, the interpretation and inference of parodic language in English news headlines is a dynamic cognitive process involving a mental process.Therefore, based on Sperber & Wilson's Relevance theory (RT) and Fauconnier's Conceptual blending theory (CBT), this paper proposes a working blending network to illustrate the cognitive mechanism in interpreting English parodic news headlines. In this working blending network, inference is the first step for the readers to understand parody as a result of the stimulus provided by the ostensive behavior of the journalists which provides a cognitive environment from which the readers gets the contextual assumption, and processes the journalists'various contextual implicatures. Contextual effects are thus inferred. In the process of inference, the readers will select relevant information which helps to work out the communicative intentions, including parodied expression and its context, parodying expression and the current context. The relevant information constructs the four Input spaces in the working network. And then, on the basis of logical information, encyclopedic information and lexical information, the readers make a set of contextual assumptions till the manifest assumption is made in the end by modification and strengthening. Furthermore, within the framework of CBT, the psychological cognitive process of pragmatic inference is analyzed in detail through selective projection and blending. Structures and elements are selectively projected from the four Input spaces to the blended space in which they are composed, completed and elaborated to create an emergent structure which does not exist in any input. Thus, the communicative intentions of the journalists and the desired effects of parody are successfully conveyed to the readers. Meanwhile, the paper discusses two interfering factors involved in interpretation of parody and the cognitive efforts required for successful understanding of the intentions.Through concrete analysis and discussion of parodic news within the framework of RT and CBT, the paper provides a rational working blending network for cognitive interpretation of parody in English news headlines. And, to some extent, it enriches the explanatory power of RT and cognitive theories, in particular CBT. Finally, it does some good to both the journalists in better employment of parody and the readers in inferring the communicative intentions.
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