A Cognitive-pragmatic Interpretation Of Parody

As a linguistic device, parody usually takes advantage of some existing language forms to conveynew information. Nowadays, it is more and more widely used in different media such as newspapers,magazines, and TV commercials. Phrase or sentence like “随心所‘浴’”,“Give me green world, or giveme yesterday” can be seen and applied in our daily reading and life. Somehow, previous studies of parodymainly focus on its rhetoric function. Thus, the present study, combining these two fundamental theories incognitive linguistics---relevance theory and conceptual blending theory, explain the cognitive mechanismbehind parody.The present study relies on the qualitative analysis of the data. The present research methodology isbased on the analysis of35typical parodies, using the observation methods to collect the languagematerials online and offline, To be specific, it makes concrete analysis on the examples of the three typesof parody with Sperber&Wilson’s Relevance theory (RT) and Fauconnier’s Conceptual blending theory(CBT) and, this paper proposes a processing space to illustrate the cognitive mechanism in interpretingparody.In this new working network, inference is the first step for the readers to understand parody as aresult of the stimulus provided by the ostensive behavior of the addresser which provides a cognitiveenvironment from which the audience gets the contextual assumption, and processes the communicators’various contextual implications. Contextual effects are thus inferred. In the process of inference, theaudiences will select relevant information which helps to work out the communicative intentions, And then,on the basis of logical information, encyclopedic information and lexical information, the audiencesmake a set of contextual assumptions till the manifest assumption is made in the end bymodification and strengthening. Furthermore, within the framework of CBT, the psychological cognitiveprocess of pragmatic inference is analyzed in detail through selective projection and blending. Structuresand elements are selectively projected to the generic space and blending space, with the help of thecognitive process space governed by relevance theory, semantic composition and completion are finished.And then, after the last step---elaboration, a new structure which does not exist in any input comes intobeing. Thus, the communicative intentions of the addressers and the desired effects of parody aresuccessfully conveyed to the audience. Meanwhile, the paper discusses two interfering factors involved ininterpretation of parody and the cognitive efforts required for successful understanding of the intentions. Through concrete analysis and discussion of parody within the framework of RT and CBT, the paperprovides a rational working blending network for cognitive interpretation of parody. And, to some extent, itenriches the explanatory power of RT and cognitive theories, in particular CBT. In addition, it does somegood to both the addressers and audience in better employment of parody and the readers in inferring thecommunicative intentions.