Meaning Construction Of Puns In Sports News Titles

As a specific type, Sports news not only broadcasts the information of sports games, butalso promotes the tenacious spirit of sports that human continuously conquer and surpassthemselves. Similar with political news and economical news, sports news also follows thebasic principles of timelessness, truth and conciseness. Nevertheless, entertainment is sportsnews’ fundamental feature and symbol, which differentiates it from other types of news. Withthe development of society and economy, participating in sports games and reading sportsnews have become an indispensible part of people’s daily life. People usually pay attention tothe information of sports games in their spare time, due to sports news’ entertaining essence.So the readers always quickly browse the titles of the newspaper in a short time and picksome interesting ones to read in detail. As a result, whether the title of a piece of sports newscan attract the readers’ attention or not determines the news’ success or failure.The creation of sports news titles is a fatal part in the whole process of news’ generation.With an aim of attracting reader’s attention and increasing the publisher’s commercial interest,the reporters of sports news often create the titles with interesting and lively rhetorical devices,like metaphor, personification, antithesis and pun. As a common figure of speech, pun iscreated from the word’s polysemy, similar or same sounds or the sentence’s complex syntacticstructures in a certain context, which endues the word or sentence with ambiguous meanings.Because pun can leave people a deep impression with its implicit and humorous character, thereporters of sports news constantly apply pun into the titles to elevate the news’ interest andattraction.Scholars have made a thorough study on puns in literature and advertisement in theaspects of rhetorics, pragmatics and semantics. However, people have not paid much attention to the analysis of sports news’ special features in terms of cognition. There is still a blank ofresearch on the meaning construction of puns in sports news titles. On the basis of detailedanalysis of linguistic data, this paper not only divides puns in sports news titles into four types—homonymic pun, paronomasia pun, sylleptic pun and grammatical pun, but alsosummarizes puns’ functions in sports news titles—attracting the reader’s attention,popularizing the relative background knowledge of sports games and aesthetic effect.From the aspect of cognition, this paper makes a minute analysis on the meaningconstruction of puns in sports news titles with Fauconnier and Turner’s ConceptualIntegration Theory. As the core part of CIT, conceptual integration is a cognitive process ofhuman’s thinking and it plays an important role in the meaning construction of humanlanguages. A model of conceptual integration network is composed of four spaces—twoinput spaces, a generic space and a blend; an operation of spaces including cross-spacemapping, projection and integration; an emergent structure and its generating operations—composition, completion and elaboration. The double meanings of pun composite thenetwork’s two input spaces, whose similar elements and structures are connected withcross-space mapping. Then the similar elements and structures of the inputs can be extractedinto a generic space that contains more abstract elements and structures. Finally, the elementsand structures of the inputs are partially projected to the blend and create an emergentstructure with a novel meaning in accordance with the knowledge of background frames,cognitive and cultural relations.All in all, through the research on the meaning construction of puns in sports news titles,this paper tries to provide people with a cognitive interpretation mechanism that is helpful forpeople to correctly understand this specific language phenomenon and in the meanwhileproves CIT’s explanatory power in language’s meaning construction.The paper is composed of five chapters. Chapter One makes a brief introduction of the thesis, explaining the pun’s definition,presenting the object, objectives, significance, the methodology and data collection of thecurrent study as well as describing the paper’s general organization.Chapter Two is a brief review of the previous studies on puns at home and abroad,including rhetorical approach, semantic approach, pragmatic approach and cognitive approach.Furthermore, it also presents some theoretical studies on puns in sports news.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework of the thesis through explaining thedevelopment of CIT and describes the theory’s network model. In addition, the four types ofconceptual integration networks of CIT are also explained in this part.Chapter Four firstly makes a general classification of pun in sports news titles andsummarizes its functions. Then, the author minutely analyzes the meaning constructionprocess of the four kinds of puns in terms of CIT.The last chapter is the conclusion, in which the author makes a summary of the paper anddiscusses the major findings of the study. It also points out some limitations of the study andprovides suggestions for the future research.