A Study Of The Production Mechanism Of Chinese Body Riddles Based On Intention-governed Multiple Blending Theory (IMT)

Riddles are a kind of linguistic games popular with people all around the world, and Chinese riddles are deeply loved by the people in China. Since the 5th century AD, many scholars have probed into them from various perspectives, such as folklore, rhetoric, Cognitive Psychology and linguistics, mainly focusing on the objective observation and static description of the forms and contents of the riddles. In recent years, although a research has been done into the meaning interpretation process of Chinese riddles from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, the theoretical framework is still vague, let alone the explanation of the production mechanism and thematic analysis of the data.In order to make up for the gap, this dissertation proposes Intention-governed Multiple Blending Theory (IMT) based on Fauconnier's Conceptual Blending Theory (BT), which is used as the theoretical framework to give a detailed analysis to the dynamic production process of Chinese body riddles, thus a new scheme has been innovated to expound the mechanism of Chinese riddles.The paper consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One focuses on an introduction to this study, including the motivation, methodology, data collection, and layout.Chapter Two presents a literature review of related studies on Chinese riddles and the gap is found.Chapter Three analyzes the limitations of BT, based on which IMT is proposed as a theoretical framework to make up for the gap, thus the production mechanism of Chinese body riddles being explained.Chapter Four concentrates on data analysis and discussion. Firstly a close database is described; then the dynamic production process of 241 Chinese body riddles are carefully analyzed under IMT assisted by pertaining statistics.Chapter Five deals with the conclusion, mainly including the three leading contributions: 1. BT is revised by bringing in Event-domain Cognitive Model (ECM) as the contents of mental spaces, constructing Intentional Space (IS) to govern all the input spaces, inventing Global Generic Space (GG) to ensure the relationships between the input spaces realized in the last blended space, and adding a newly discovered type of integration networks: Balance Network. Based on this, IMT is proposed as the theoretical framework of this dissertation.2. The structural, phonetic and semantic features of the data are carefully investigated under IMT.3. In the production of Chinese body riddles, 15 conceptual metaphors are employed, involving 15 types of source domains. As a result, the types of source domains discovered by Deignan (2001) and K?vecses (2002) are increased by 6 new ones with the other 6 being revised.This chapter also points out the limitations of the dissertation and offers some suggestions for the further researches.