A Conceptual Integration Approach To The Natural Images In Su Shi’s Farewell Lyrics

As one of the most important component in Chinese poetry history,Song lyrics contain a kind of sincere and profound emotion which wasattaching with concise and simple words. It is the gem of Chineseclassical literature. Su Shi was the typical representative poet in Songdynasty and his poems and lyrics were constantly praised by youngergenerations. He had been relegated repeatedly and migrated to severalbarren areas, so the above reasons cause his life constantly facing withparting. To some extent, migration created a realistic environment for hiscreation of farewell lyrics. Natural images in Su Shi’s farewell lyrics arenot the overlying of simple static natural scenery. In his poems, they hadbeen given fresh life. Natural images were not only a subjective feelingswhich vividly expressed by the poets, but also the individual will andaspiration which completely expressed by the poets, which means thepoets wanted to adopt natural images to achieve the emotional resonance.For quite a long time, domestic scholars have been studied Su Shi’spoetry from the literature perspective and they focused on the analysis ofpainting poetry or relegation lyrics. In addition, people who studied SuShi’s farewell lyrics were mostly from the literary point of view onstudying their creative artistic effect or deeply meaning, or from theaesthetic perspective to study its aesthetic function, nevertheless seldomresearch can be found of studying the adoption of natural images in SuShi’s farewell lyrics from the view point of psychology or analyzing theconnotation form cognitive angle.The paper applied conceptual integration theory to explore thenatural images in Su Shi’s farewell lyrics. We proposed conceptualintegration theory has strong explanatory power on natural images in SuShi’s farewell lyrics. To prove the hypothesis, we decided to propose thedetail of mental space theory, the concepts of integration compression,mapping, and conceptual integration network to explore the meaning construction for the natural images in Su Shi’s farewell lyrics. The studyis referred to planting images and animal images, as well as weather,astronomy and geography natural images in Su Shi’s farewell lyrics. Byway of a series of conceptual integration mechanisms which includedcomposition, completion and elaboration to natural images, we revealedthe special meaning of natural images in Su Shi’s farewell lyrics.The paper maintains that the method of applying CIT to interpret thenatural images is very creative and useful. Moreover, all the arrangementof natural images are not appointed by the poet without aims, butdynamically selected. The outcome offers the strong evidences to uswhen poets are creating, as well as conveying his emotion by borrowingimages in the process of creation.We clarify that if the readers understand the natural images isolatedand hastily, they can not fully capture the poet’s psychological track orflavor, only by connecting the concepts or images with backgroundknowledge in the discourse by producing mapping connection can makegenuine meaning explicit and directional. The new cognitive approach ofanalyzing natural images can expand the reader’s awareness icon;meanwhile, it provides a new perspective to interpret Chinese classicalpoetry.