A Cognitive-pragmatic Approach To The Construal Mechanism Of English Conundrum

As an important form of English riddle, English conundrum is loved by allpeople. So far, scholars have studied English conundrum from various perspectives,such as anthropology, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. These studieseither focus on its definitions and characteristics, or apply linguistic theories toanalyze its understanding process. However, studies on English conundrum bylinguistic theories still have many defects; therefore, they are needed to be improved.This paper intends to integrate Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT),Frame-Shifting Theory (FST) and Relevance Theory (RT) to establish a CFR modelto analyze English conundrum from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, with the aimto offer a more convincing model for the construal mechanism of English conundrum.According to analyses, this paper finds that CBT fails to offer a basis for theestablishment of input spaces, and that FST fails to explain the reason of frameshifting and that RT lacks concrete inferential procedures to explain the understandingprocess of language. Therefore, a CFR model is integrated to offer a more reasonableexplanation for the construal mechanism of English conundrum.The construal mechanism of English conundrum can be described as: two inputspaces, namely, question input and answer input are established at first by theconundrumee. Usually，the former can be established according to the informationprovided in the conundrum, while the latter undergoes a process of frame-shiftingbecause the default frame activated first can not generate the solution of theconundrum when matching onto question input. The conundrumee has to put moreeffort and use inference to activate another frame to establish answer input. Duringthis process, the principle of optimal relevance forces the conundrumee to shift frames.Then the two inputs project to the blended space with the emergent structure servingas the solution to the conundrum.