Interpretation Of Poetic Imagery Under The Framework Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Poetic imagery is the soul of poetry and the objective entity, with the author’s subjective emotions being projected into. As the major form of literature, poems vividly express the subjective emotion of the poet, through the implicit using of imageries, and subtly convey the emotional intention to the readers. As the most exclusive poetic pattern, the Chinese Song Poetry combining Chinese classical rhythm is a unique style of classical poetry, which often expresses rich emotional connotation through a variety of imageries. Therefore, many scholars did profound study from several perspectives, including sociology, aesthetics, translation, and rhetoric level. But the cognitive approach has been ignored by most of the scholars.After being put forward by Fauconnier&Turner, the conceptual blending theory enjoyed great attention among all the scholars in China and the overseas. The theory, with complete framework, functions through flexible cognitive mechanism. The conceptual theory includes four mental spaces. Different conceptual integration networks would be separated, depending on the distinctive connections between the four mental spaces. Through selective mapping of various elements from these input spaces to blend space, the emergent structure would be generated after the process of "combination","completion" and "elaboration". The conceptual blending theory provides a brand new instrument to analyze all kinds linguistic phenomenon, and has been widely applied in the analysis to advertising, poetry, drama, news, movies and narrative prose and so on.Based on the Chinese Song Poetry, the source of the database, the thesis general classifies the poetic imageries appearing in Song Poetry according to the criterion of main writing style school (the Sentimental School and the Free and Powerful School) and various emotional themes in schools. Taking the same major poetic imagery appearing across the Schools and different emotional themes, the thesis analyzes the cognitive mapping network models between the mental spaces triggered by the poetic imageries. After the inner relations compression between mental spaces, the emergent meaning gradually created in the conceptual integration process:the blending with mental spaces and the integration between poets’ emotional intention and text meaning of poetic imagery, under the mapping network. Meanwhile, the thesis also reveals the cognitive mechanism under the conceptual integration of poetic imagery. Applying the conceptual blending theory, the thesis finds the connections compression between mental spaces (cause-effect relation; time, space relation; identity relation; part and whole relation), the metaphorical mapping between poetic imageries and the padding towards virtual dimension coming from the readers are vital parts for the cognitive mechanism of emergent meaning production.The significance of this paper lies in two aspects:1) As for text selecting and theory applying, analyzing the poetic imagery in Chinese Song Poetry in the approach of conceptual integration theory can not only provide new perspective for the appreciation of classical poetry, but also widens the theory’s application.2) This thesis also gives enlightenment to ancient Chinese Song Poetry translation and teaching.