The Cognitive Mechanism Of English Blends

One of the primary problems in cognitive linguistics is that how to produce new concepts through composing old concepts. In language, the producing process of a new word is in nature the construction process of a new meaning.As a word formation with a long history, blending is worth studying. In the process of word formation, English blending word is a quite typical word-building pattern in contemporary English, referring to both compounding and shortening. Therefore, the cognitive mechanism of explaining meaning construction for portmanteau words is of great significance.This thesis will firstly give the statements and analyses of the research status of the related fields at home and abroad, and point out the advantages and disadvantages of existing cognitive mechanisms of English blend. Then100English blends are selected randomly in The Concise Oxford English Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary Online as language material. Based on the conceptual integration networks proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, deep exploration is made towards the classification of English blends and its corresponding interpreting mechanism with presentation of figures so as to illustrate directly and clearly. The four types of blends on semantic construction (simplex blends, mirror blends, single-scope blends and double-scope blends) are discussed one by one. The thesis will use a method combining description and explanation, mainly focusing on qualitative research of the blend material, in order to survey and analyze the cognitive process of meaning construction of English blends. During the analysis of single-scope blends, we find that analogy is not an independent word formation, but belongs to blending. After holistic analysis, we come to a conclusion that the cognitive mechanism of English blends can be expounded with the integration of different mental spaces, which gives a strong explanation to the coherence of English blends springing up in modern English.