Cognitive Analysis Of The Imagery In The Book Of Songs

The Book of Songs is the first collection of Chinese poetry from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Mid Spring-Autumn period. Those305poems enjoy great popularity at home and abroad because of its diversity in contents and particularity in structures. Numerous scholars have made great development in the traditional views from aspects of aesthetics, rhetoric, religion or even mythology. Diversity as they are, those researches ignore deep coherence mechanism in poems. As a result, they don’t succeed in answering questions like: Through what kind of way the readers are able to feel the poems’vividness?; how the deep meaning created and successfully received by readers; and why readers can recall one type of poetry in The Book of Songs without too much thinking and keep it long in memory? Therefore, this thesis focuses on the cognitive motivations of pomes in The Book of Songs.This thesis tries to study the imagery in The Book of Songs from multiple perspectives, unifying conceptual metaphor theory, iconicity theory and script theory to have a comprehensive understanding of poems in The Book of Songs. It will help us explore how conceptual system helps meaning construction in analyzing poetic discourse. Conceptual metaphor leads to have a prototypical reading of imagery in poems of The Book of Songs and the thesis finds that the conceptual metaphor system underlying the colorful images doesn’t look as it can be elaborated. Iconicity is a significant feature which facilitates the form and the meaning of the imagery to interact each other to produce a poem. Script theory is likely to jump out of understanding poems between lines and tries to help readers to summarize three typical scripts according to the classifications of poems in The Book of Songs, which aims to explain why poems in it can be spread so widely and remembered that long.It would be also valuable to reveal the deep meaning of poems, facilitating poetry understanding and providing some useful ways in translation of Chinese classic poems. This thesis tends to prove that cognitive linguistics is as powerful as other ways of poetry analysis and it do can help readers to have deep interpretation of poems in The Book of Songs.