A Cognitive Construal Of Ironic Utterances In Red Sorghum

The study of irony has a long history. Generally speaking, irony is a commonly seen phenomenon that is usually regarded as a figure of speech to be employed in daily communication. Its beauty especially lies in its function to largely add artistically aesthetic fascination to the appreciation of literature works. Based on the long time of researching work, studies of irony, however, are principally confined to the field of rhetoric, focusing primarily on its definitions, classifications, traits and functions. With development in depth, studies with respect to irony have extended to the distinguished researching scopes, such as semantics, psychology, pragmatics and cognitive field or so. Undoubtedly, those studies are far from sufficient and effective, and hence much room for further studies of ironic utterances is naturally left.As the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Mo Yan has written a large quantity of enduringly popular novels, among which Red Sorghum is referred to as the most outstanding one. The novel narrates a love story concerning Commander Yu Zhan’ao and Grandma Dai Fenglian, and depicts their legendary experiences of fighting against the Japanese invaders, endowing readers with unusual reading experience. In terms of Red Sorghum itself, plenty of profound connotations can be probed into. Few scholars, however, have done research into ironic utterances in Mo Yan’s noted novel Red Sorghum, let alone from the cognitive point of view.Conceptual Blending Theory has strong explanatory power with which diversified scholar have made contributions to studies of other academic fields. However, whether it can be employed to make a cognitive analysis of ironic utterances in Red Sorghum still needs to be studied. The present paper intends to give the cognitive interpretation of ironic utterances in Red Sorghum based on Conceptual Blending Theory. With the help of conceptual blending networks, the construal process of the corpus to find out the intended meaning is displayed. Due to the reason that Red Sorghum is set in specific historical background, the storage of necessary background is in need for one to fully understand the intended meanings and feel the ironical effects.It can be found through the study that the linguistic data selected from Red Sorghum will all be attributed to one of the five types of conceptual blending networks-the single-scope network. The process to interpret the ironic utterances in Red Sorghum can be treated as a dynamic cognitive activity. In the process, two input spaces which contain distinct frame respectively are firstly established. With further blending, completion as well as elaboration, the intended meanings contained in ironic utterances are seized, which lays a solid foundation for the understanding of the writing style of the novel. There is no doubt that it provides great help to the grasp of the theme of Red Sorghum.