News headlines are an essential part of news. At present, scholars have made a large number of analyses of its language features, functions, rhetoric, pragmatics and so on, but in the aspect of the meaning construction during the process of news comprehension, they have not explored very much from a cognitive perspective.By using Conceptual Integration Theory, this thesis aims to help news readers to analyze the meaning construction of Chinese news headlines. The author collects and analyzes more than one thousand news headlines in Global Times, and the results show that the words used in news headlines can activate two or more distinct mental spaces,and cross-space mappings will occur between their partial elements, then, the blend space will be formed by a selective projection, and the emergent structure in the blend space is the meaning of news headlines, which shows that Conceptual Integration Theory can be used to analyze the Chinese news headlines. This study expands the scope of Conceptual Integration Theory, and proves the theory’s great explanatory power. The author hopes to offer some references for further study. |