A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Satirical Exaggeration In Fortress Besieged

In the literary work, Fortress Besieged, there are a lot of satirical exaggerations, which have shown their unique characteristics. This special type of language expression reflects the humorous and satirical writing style of Qian Zhongshu, author of the book, and it is the main way that the author has used to vividly describe the characters and the background. So, it has important research value. However, in a very long period of time, people have put satirical exaggeration merely as a rhetorical means. In recent years, with the rapid development of cognitive linguistics, the research has begun a shift from the perspective of traditional rhetoric study to cognitive linguistic analysis. Cognitive linguistics holds that the exaggeration is not only a means of language art, but also a thinking mode of the human being, so is the satirical exaggeration. However, systematic researches on the satirical exaggeration from the perspective of cognitive linguistics are rarely seen, not to mention the study of its deep generation mechanism.Based on the collecting of the satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged, this paper takes Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy Theory as its theoretical background and discusses the classifications, characteristics, meaning construction and cognitive motivations of satirical exaggeration in Fortress Besieged using a qualitative analysis.It mainly answers the following three questions:(1) what are the classifications and characteristics of satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged? (2) How do satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged construct their meanings? (3) What are the cognitive motivations of satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged?Through the study of satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged, the following findings are obtained:(1) there are two kinds of satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged:single-reference-point satirical exaggeration and multiple-reference-point. satirical exaggeration. The characteristics of satirical exaggerations cover two aspects:semantic and grammatical. Semantically, the satirical exaggeration embodies the features of contradictoriness, extremeness and sarcasm. Grammatically, the satirical exaggeration embodies the features of vocabulary markedness and sentence pattern markedness. At vocabulary level, there always will be some numerals, limit words, idioms and certain commonly used images. At the sentence level, the satirical exaggerated expression also has some sentence patterns employed regularly, like " X像Y " (X is the same as Y),“只…就…”(”by merely......"), and "...得(de)..."(2) This paper points out that the cognitive meaning construction of single-reference-point satirical exaggeration and multiple-reference-point satirical exaggeration are based on conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. (3) The cognitive motivations of satirical exaggerations in Fortress Besieged are the feudal social system, traditional social ideas and emotional attitudes of the cognitive subject.This thesis broadens the scope of the study of satirical exaggeration, and gives a better cognitive explanation of the language in Fortress Besieged to some extent. In the meanwhile, it is of referential value for the teaching of rhetoric.