On The Cognitive Comprehension Of Irony From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Irony is a rhetorical device which is used to express negation, satire and mockery with the opposite words and as a common form of expression, some scholars pay more attention and concern to irony. So far, many scholars have made a systematic research on irony from the perspective of non-linguistic approachrhetoric, philosophy and psychology and linguistic approach-semantics and pragmatics, which has yielded fruitful results. All these studies, however, cannot reveal irony?s online dynamic cognitive process. The development of Conceptual Blending Theory breaks through the limitations of the traditional study on irony and it provides a solid theoretical basis for interpreting the cognitive mechanism behind the meaning of irony. And the present study will make a detailed analysis of the online comprehensible mechanism of irony extracted from Pride and Prejudice by means of Conceptual Blending Theory.The thesis primarily adopts qualitative approaches to interpret the process of cognitive comprehension of 60 ironic utterances extracted from the novel Pride and Prejudice. And according to different types of Conceptual Blending Network, 60 ironic utterances are classified into three types of network models. And then the author randomly extracts 2 ironic utterances and applies the Conceptual Blending Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner to analyze every step of the process of meaning construction of irony, that is, the construction of mental spaces, selective projections, cross-space mappings and the Emergent Structure in the Blended Space. In a word, this present study illustrates the meaning construction of irony, reveals the unconscious dynamic blending process in the comprehension of irony, and confirms the great cognitive and explanatory power of Conceptual Blending Theory.Through a series of discussions, the thesis is trying to answer the following three questions:(1) How does the addressee recognize the utterance ironic when he or she receives an utterance?(2) What are the main factors during the cognitive comprehension of irony if the addressee wants to have a better understanding of the ironic utterance?(3) Can the operation of network models of CBT provide a complete explanation for the cognitive comprehension of irony and if can, how does it work? Through the analysis and discussion based on the Conceptual Blending Theory, we can draw the following conclusion:(1) The addressee identifies the ironic utterances according to three characteristics of irony and Yus?s model. Among the features of irony, one of the important factors is the multi-faceted incompatibility which plays an important role in identifying irony utterances.(2)There are three essential factors in identifying the ironic utterances: the addressee?s essential ability, shared background knowledge and context. These three factors are indispensable in the process of understanding the ironic meaning and the essential condition in comprehending the ironic utterances.(3) There are generally four types of networks in Conceptual Blending Network and the present study find out that Mirror Network, Single-Scope Network and Double-Scope Network can fully explain the process of constructing the real-time ironic meaning, which has a great explanation to identify and understand the ironic utterances.The thesis will analyze the cognitive comprehension of irony in Pride and Prejudice with the help of Conceptual Blending Theory and meanwhile prove its feasibility in the analysis of literary texts which is a preliminary attempt. In addition, the present study provides a new perspective to research ironic artistic charming of Jane Austen, which is beneficial to understand and appreciate ironic utterances in other literary works.