On Parody In Net Catchwords From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

With the popularity of network, more and more netspeaks are coming into being. Net catchwords enrich the netspeak, making the netizens a group and are exerting more and more influences on daily life and even the official language use. As a rhetorical device, parody shares the characteristics as simpleness and creation and has been widely found in written and oral language, which has also been attracting more and more attention from the researchers. People’s living experience and understanding of the world has been influencing their way of constructing new words. As the reflection of this, construction of each net catchword is constrained by people’s cognitive rules. Different from traditional study on the definition, classification, characteristics and rhetorical effects of parody, this thesis prefers to make the analysis from the cognitive perspective in order to find the inner mechanism behind the production of parody in net catchwords.In this thesis, net catchwords from the year2006to2011in China are collected from Annual Chinese New Words Lists selected from the Report of Language Using Situation in China published each year on the official website of Education Ministry of PRC. These data are mainly attained through the corpus of National Language Resource Monitoring Center (including print media, audio media and network news). These new words come from different fields, such as business, arts, clothing, politics, technology, health and sports, computers, food, law, lifestyle and etc.This paper is a tentative study of parody in net catchwords from the perspective of cognition based on conceptual blending theory (CBT). CBT traditionally comes from mental space theory, mainly to make a description of the projection and integration of conceptual elements. According to Fauconnier, in the meaning-form process, mainly four basic mental spaces are involved, namely, input space1, input space2, the generic space and the blend. The whole process goes like this:first, elements from the two input spaces are selectively projected to the generic space. Then, through composition, completion and elaboration, the blend is formed. During the process, emergent structure takes place, which includes elements that do not exist in the former two inputs. Based on the studies done by the previous researchers, this thesis tends to summarize a definition of parody first, followed by the characteristic of parody in net catchwords, and analysis of parody in net catchwords based on CBT. Then, a summary about the analysis is given to explain why other rhetorical devices of parody and other cognitive theories are not chosen as the topic and theoretical framework in this thesis. With description and explanation as the research method, this thesis is a qualitative study.From the cognitive study of parody in net catchwords based on CBT, it is found that cross-space mapping and conceptual integration are the inner mechanism of it, while emergent structure serves as the motivation of its production. The exploration also proves that CBT can be used in the explanation of the production of parody in net catchwords. The viewpoint this thesis has taken is a new try for the study of parody in net catchwords and CBT as well, so it is hoped that the study here will benefit the future study of parody of net catchwords and widen the application of CBT in language research and other fields in the meanwhile.