A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of English Zeugma From The Perceptive Of RT And CB

This thesis focuses on the cognitive pragmatic interpretation of English zeugma from theperspectives of the Relevance Theory (RT) and the Conceptual Blending Theory (CB).We respectively apply the Relevance Theory (RT) and the Conceptual Blending Theory(CB) to the interpretation of English zeugma and find their defects. Therefore, we integrate RTand CB to interpret English zeugma, analyze their complementarities in comprehending Englishzeugma, propose RT&CB complementary working models in interpreting English zeugma andtest them with specific examples of English zeugma.During the interpretation process, firstly we integrate relevance, zeugma, cognitive context,conceptual blending and emergent structure to construct a preliminary complementary workingmodel of RT&CB to interpret English zeugma. When applying it, we find its explanatorypower becomes weaker with more collocations in one zeugma and more context information.Moreover, there is no guarantee for the rationality of the emergent structure. So we secondlyamend our preliminary working model into an extended one by the use of the following sevenelements: relevance, conventional collocation, unconventional collocation, salient cognitivecontext, conceptual blending, emergent structure and context verification.Our three main findings are the following.1) Constructing salient cognitive context is thekey to the interpretation of English zeugma. The longer the discourse where zeugmas arecontained, the more difficult it is to construct the salient cognitive context.2) According to lessor more numbers of the collocations in one English zeugma, less or more context informationneeded in the interpretation process and short or long of the discourses where English zeugmaslie, we can use the preliminary, the extended or both of the two working models to interpretEnglish zeugma.3) A group of zeugmas which are dominated by the same dominating wordand lie in the same discourse should be first sliced into several small groups according to theirrelevance in the small context, and be interpreted one by one, and then the emergent structures of them can be combined together to express the final communicative intention. Besides,context verification relies more on the following new context information which appears afterthis group of zeugmas.Our research can provide a new perspective for the pragmatic and cognitive studies ofEnglish zeugma and can give some theoretical guidance for teaching English vocabularies andrhetoric.