A Study On Meaning Construction Of English Subjunctive Mood In Literary Works From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Much attention is paid to English subjunctive mood by linguists and grammarians who have tried to probe into the issue from various aspects, including its definition, classification, and functions in communication. There even have been debates on whether there is grammatical category of it. Usually considered only a grammatical phenomenon, it is in fact adopted as a writing skill to express some certain value and humanistic thought in literary works. Therefore, this paper attempts to study the meaning construction of subjunctive mood in English literary works from the perspective of cognitive research.In view of the situation, based on Fauconnier's conceptual blending theory in the 1990 s, the present study applies quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct analysis of the use of subjunctive mood in literary works after randomly eliciting subjunctive sentences mainly from English and American novels, and attempts to establish a set of conceptual integration network model on meaning construction of the subjunctive mood in English literary works, so as to reveal the meaning construction process of subjunctive mood in English literary works and have a better understanding of the nature of the subjunctive mood.The research uncovers that(1) Background cultural knowledge, encyclopedic information and context play important roles in process of meaning construction. Readers, the writer and the characters in works all take part in it, which is different from meaning construction of subjunctive mood in non-literary works. Readers construct the meaning with the expectation of the writer, and the characters in works are expressed to some desires of the writer and the age which is opposite to the reality. As a result, meaning construction of subjunctive mood in literary works has its own characteristics, including ground mapping, fictive motion and metaphorical mapping, through which writers can express their ideas and characters' personalities better. Linking with these factors, the model we have established is that it firstly maps a common point in two mental spaces which are referred to counterfactuality and fact according to the grounding box of writer and reader, meanwhile, it produces a fictive motion which can convey or infer information about the physical layout of a scene in process of projection. Then the elements or part of elements are mapped into generic space through a metaphorical way. The specific composition and elaboration in generic space is projected the blended space in which a new structure is generated.(2) The conceptual blending theory has a great powerful interpretation in literature. Under the framework of the conceptual blending theory, the subjunctive mood is classified into mirror network, single-scope network and double-scope network types, which is different from traditional classifications. In the mirror network, both of input spaces relate to the blending. Different from mirror network, only one of the inputs in a one-sided network is projected into the frame of the blended space, and the other has nothing to do with the blended space. In double-scope network, the two inputs contain distinct frames, and the blend is constructed by structure from each frame.In a word, this thesis aims to interpret meaning construction of subjunctive mood in literary works on the basis of conceptual blending theory, and reinforces the explanatory power of the theory itself. This paper not only provides a new perspective for studying grammatical phenomena in English literary works, meanwhile the study of the subjunctive mood in literature enriches the diversity of data, and helps people understanding the conceptual blending theory more deeply.