A Study On The Cognitive Poetics Of Li Shangyin's Poems From The Perspectives Of Conceptual Metaphor, Conceptual Metonymy And Iconicity

Li Shang-yin's poetry features its complicated images, illusory impression, gorgeous description and endless aftertaste. There remains large room for critics'interpretations, which actually approach meanings of Li's poems with different conclusions. Traditional literary criticism explores literal meaning on intuitive and experiential basis while it ignores deep coherence mechanism in poems. Therefore, it fails to answer questions such as: How can the characteristics of ambiguity of Li's poetry come into being? Why readers can experience and realize multi-interpretations for the same poem? How does the poet connect the structure and the meaning of a poem naturally? etc, all of which have to do with the issue of structuring, yet traditional literary criticism concerns little in this field. In a word, it ignores cognitive motivation of a poem.Recently studies at discourse level are catching more and more attention in cognitive linguistics. Many scholars at home begin to apply related paradigms of cognitive linguistics to criticize Chinese classical poems, Li Shangyin's poems included. However, those studies are likely to take a simplex paradigm instead of multiple perspectives. And this paradigm tends to be conceptual metaphor theory usually while studies form perspectives of iconicity and metonymy are hard to find. They also fail to point out the relationship between the structure of poems and their themes.This study takes multiple views to study poem structuring in Li Shang-yin's poems with theories of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and iconicity. It will explore how conceptual system helps meaning construction in poetic discourse development. Conceptual metaphor contributes to discourse coherence and structuring with its systematicity and coherence, conceptual metonymy with its meaning contiguity and iconicity with correspondence between language and conception. And the thesis finds that the conceptual metaphor system underlying the colorful poetic images doesn't look as rich as it can be elaborated. Prototypical reading understanding of poems can be obtained through metaphorical reading. The poet tends to use the whole and its part ICM metonymy to add up ambiguity to poems. Metonymic mappings are more fundamental to meaning construction in poems, but they contribute less to poetry than metaphorical mappings do. And iconicity is an important feature which helps the form and the meaning interact to produce a poem.It would also be conducive to revealing the beauty of poems, promoting poetry understanding and offering some reference for translating Chinese classical poems. This study is supportive to prove that cognitive linguistics is as convincing in discourse level analysis as in word and sentence levels analysis.