| Conceptual blending/integration theory, which brought forward by Fauconnier and Turner,argues cognitive mechanism for language comprehension comes from the perspectives ofcognitive science and neuroscience. It also reveals the application of reasoning strategies in theprocess of meaning construction. However, this theory exposes some drawbacks in analyzinglanguages. This idea can be supported as early as the research of Tversky and Kahneman (1973)who have demonstrated the reasoning strategies are themselves fraught with weaknesses.Damasio’s somatic marking theory illustrates the importance of the emotion in the process ofreasoning and emphasizes that emotion can guide our comprehension. This claim is confirmedfurther by Slingerland (2005) who proved that somatic marking theory could supplement theconceptual blending theory to get an ideal cognitive analysis for language phenomenon.Tan Roots is a collection of maxim and aphorism in ancient China, and its features are laid onits traditional elegance and image. In view of this, this study takes the qualitative research to thecases and aimed to show the emotional factors’ supplementary for the cognition. First of all,grounding box is accepted as a part of the conceptual integration network to give a reasonable pathfrom the ancient Chinese to the modern language. Secondly, somatic markers build an emotionalspace to give a material basis for the conceptual blending network. Thirdly,“mini-space” is usedto illustrate the pragmatic blending process.Research has reached the expected goal. According to this research, we found that somaticmarking theory not only offers an emotional space, but also helps to project the certain elementsfrom the inputs to the blending space. Secondly, there are a certain common points existingbetween those two theories: they are all experimental and take the memory as the background;viewed from the text, those theories are all helpful to classify something that has an obscurecognitive category to a fixed category. |
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