The Production Mechanism Of Pun

As a common language phenomenon, pun is widely used in literature and ourdaily communication. For centuries, pun was regarded as a rhetorical device.Nowadays, more and more scholars at home and abroad have been paying attentionto pun from perspectives of semantics, syntax, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.On the basis of former scholars’ abundant researches, this thesis attempts to constructa framework by building an RAC model, which integrates the Relevance Theory(RT), Adaptation Theory (AT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) with an aimto reveal the production mechanism of pun.RT, AT and CBT are the three fundamental theories of pragmatic and cognitivelinguistics, which have their respective strengths and shortages. In the study of thepun’s production mechanism, the three theories are mutually complementary. First ofall, from the micro perspective, RT emphasizes that communication is a process ofseeking the optimal relevance within the paradigm of ostensive-inference. However,it bears a sort of subjectivity, for it’s hard to explain why a certain kind ofinterpretation is relevant. According to AT, communication should be treated fromthe perspectives of adaptation, society and culture. The production of language is adynamic process of adaptation and choice-making. It focuses on describing andexplaining language phenomenon, but it fails to provide a persuasive theoreticalfoundation and cognitive orientation for adaptation. As we can see, RT is powerful inexplanation, while AT is strong in description. They are complementary. Secondly,from the macro point of view, CBT provides a cognitive framework of conceptualblending, which analyzes language phenomena by conceptual mapping betweenmental space and conceptual blending process. It puts emphasis on the cognitiveperspective, while RT and AT pay more attention to the pragmatic perspective. In thiscase, the two different perspectives constitute the complementarities, which prove thenecessity and possibility of integration. In order to make up the respective deficiencies of the three theories in exploringpun’s production mechanism, we build up a new RAC model in this thesis, which isbased on RT, AT and CBT. This RAC model is further applied to analyze differentkinds of puns. According to RAC model, the production of pun is triggered by theintention in the speaker’s mental world, which evokes two input spaces. TheRelevance-Adaptation process refers to make choices dynamically from numerouspossibilities in the social, cultural and linguistic contexts under the principle ofrelevance, which provides input resources for online blending process in the mentalworld. After matching, cross-mapping and selective projecting, the ultimate pun isproduced in the blended space. To be specific, the production mechanism of pun is aconceptual blending process, for which relevance-adaptation chooses necessaryinformation dynamically in order to satisfy the communicational needs.