| Compositional phrases (CP) are widely used in people’s daily communication.Traditionally, they are recognized as collocative expressions or collocative phrases. While, in1995, Igor Mel’ uk used CP to name these phrases. CPs have been studied from manyperspectives, such as EFL teaching, Corpus study and lexicography. However, none of thesestudies has revealed the cognitive mechanism of CP.Lyrics are so close to people’s daily life. One of the most prominent features of lyricsis that they include numbers of CPs. Song-writers would like to use CPs to express theirunique feelings and ideas, or even use them to construct images and pictures. Therefore, CPsare full of semantic leaps which require people to understand them in a cognitively on-lineapproach.Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) is a new theory which is firstly proposed byFauconnier in1990s. The spring-up of CBT is considered as a significant development ofcognitive linguistics. During the last16years, more and more scholars became interested inCBT, because it not only was a brand new theory but also was powerful in interpretingmeaning construction in a cognitive and dynamic way.In this thesis, the author attempts to use CBT to interpret how people understand CPs inlyrics and what is the cognitive mechanism of CP in lyrics. He chooses lyrics by MariahCarey, a famous superstar of America, as a corpus. He mainly studies two types of CP:collocations and clichés, by means of four prototypical blending networks in CBT: simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scopenetworks, and double-scope networks. Based on the study of these networks, the authorattempts to interpret that uncompositionality is also an important attribute of CPs which is notspecified by Igor Mel’ uk. As understanding lyrics, to some extent, is an efficient way tolearn English, the author expects that this thesis would provide English learners with a newapproach to understanding CPs. In addition, he hopes his research would offer a new angle tostudy CPs. |
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