| Robert Frost (1874--1963) is one of the most brilliant talents in American literary circle of 20th century. His commitment to literature makes him the most glittering star in this field and so are his literary works, this is particularly true for his poems. The poems created from his pen are flexible in style, free in structure; simple on the surface, complex in reality. All these characteristics makes it a hot research point for nowadays researches.As for Robert Frost’s poems’studies, based on the existing statistics, we can see that researches have been conducted from various point of views, including literature, sociology, psychology, aesthetics and linguistics. The variety in research matches the significance of the great poet, whereas, the Cognitive Integration Theory, as one of the most important theories in linguistics, was not emphasized in Frost’s poetic research. The existing researches are confined to the static study model "language--meaning", few researchers took notice of the process as to how cognitive mechanism operated dynamically and how implications of the poems constructed on-line. For the interpretation part, most of the researchers tend to illustrate their ideas through words explanation, seldom was the diagrams inserted. With the help of diagrams, employing CIT to analyze the underlying mechanism in the cognitive process of Robert Frost’s poems, the paper just makes a complementary study in this field. Through it, the complicated process of the poetic cognition was fully and clearly open to readers. When talking about the research object, researches adopting CIT as the theoretical foundation are mainly restricted to teaching methodology, translation, rhetorics and pragmatics, few has relations with poetry. Cognitive Integration Theory is well-acknowledged for its vigorous explanatory power in meaning re-construction and information reunion, which is often used to interpret and analyze complicated language points, and Frost’s poems are famous for its unique characteristics "seemingly simple, complicated indeed", which needs to be interpreted. It is just the way to employ the CIT to analyze Frost’s poems. The paper intends to employ CIT to demonstrate how dynamic cognitive process operates and how the poetic meaning constructs on-line through conceptual integrating and emergent structure. Additionally, as both the theoretical framework and poems are quite abstract and rather difficult to understand, some figures and diagrams are inserted, thus facilitating the comprehension of the analytic process.This paper mainly consists of five chapters. Chapter one is introduction part, which briefly presents research background, research purpose and significance, data collection and methodology as well as thesis structure. Chapter two is literature review part, which gives an overview of traditional studies on Robert Frost’s poems home and abroad, especially the studies from the perspective of cognitive linguistics which is closely related to my study. The limitations of the previous studies have also been put forward. Chapter three is the theoretical framework, which lays a solid theoretical foundation for the whole poems analysis and facilitates the following concrete poems explanation and interpretation. It gives a brief introduction to CIT systematically and emphasizes the core part of CIT:conceptual integration network. Besides, basic operating principles and operation mechanism of conceptual integration, integration network together with essential elements of CIT are also introduced. Chapter four is the body part and we firstly divides Frost’s poems into three categories:poems concerning "Trees", "Human Nature" and "Women" based on themes and meanings from poetic perspective. Then, taking Frost’s three categories of poems as research object respectively, we accordingly give vivid interpretations as to how dynamic cognitive operation process and poems’on-line meaning construction fully realized within the framework of CIT. In addition, figures and diagrams are also inserted in this part for better comprehension.Chapter five is the conclusion part, in which major findings, limitations of this study are summarized and suggestions for further researches are put forward.The studies will do more than to broaden the study perspectives in poetic circle, and meanwhile provide new inspiration and reference for the future studies. In addition, the emergent structure in Cognitive Integration Theory makes it possible to give a convincing explanation on complicated and far-reaching linguistic phenomena. In this paper, studies will also deeply probe into Frost’s poems and give a full explanation to the underlying dynamic cognitive process, which will provide enlightenment and suggestions for English poetry teaching and learning, thus making it a task worth our attention and efforts. |
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