A Cognitive-pragmatic Interpretation Of Parody In News Headlines

The present study is a qualitative study of parody aiming at revealing the mental process in interpreting parody in news headlines within a newly-formed cognitive-pragmatic model.We live in an information era and are bombarded by various kinds of news every day. Duo to the time limitation of news readers living in a busy modern society, the importance of news headlines is strengthened. Therefore, being a rhetorical device, parody is now widely applied in news headlines by journalists to create humorous, novel, contrastive and ironical effects to attract news readers. As a matter of fact, the news headline is not merely the information carrier, but also a kind of communication between journalists and news readers. Thus, to interpret parody in news headlines is a cognitive activity. Consequently, the present thesis on one hand is to present the meaning construction process of parody in news headlines and on the other hand to illustrate how communicative intention and desired effects are achieved in this news communication.In order to illustrate the cognitive interpretation process of parody in news headlines, the author proposes a new blending model on the basis of Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory. Within this new blending model, relevance is the presupposition and inference is conducted throughout the entire process. The parodying expression, the parodied expression together with their contexts inferred by news readers serve as elements in four input spaces. Then relevant information in the input space is selected on the guidance of relevant principle for future blending. Finally, after composing, completing and elaboration the information in the blended space, the emergent structure is generated. The emergent structure just conveys the communicative intention and desired effects and the whole analyzing process illustrates the meaning construction process of parody in news headlines.To sum up, by means of a cognitive-pragmatic analysis combining several most representative parodic news examples at different linguistic levels, the present research vividly illustrates the cognitive mental process in interpreting news parody. And at the same time, this thesis demonstrates the feasibility of combining Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory to set up a new blending model and enriches the explanatory power of the two theories.