The Study Of The Meaning Deconstruction Of Chinese Puns Based On News Headlines From Beijing Daily

Pun,as a frequently used rhetorical device,is widely applied as well as investigated.In recent years,with the rapid development of cognitive science,pragmatic-cognitive researches at home and abroad concentrating on puns have mushroomed.Researches on Chinese puns,the range of which is far smaller than that of English puns.To date,many studies on Chinese puns have been conducted gathering in topics of rhetorical functions,pragmatic functions,meaning construction and cognitive interpretation.In general,the research materials are nothing more than literature works,poems,advertisements and Chinese two-part allegorical sayings.Whereas,cognitive studies on Chinese puns in news headlines,despite its frequent use,have not been explored in depth,especially in terms of an empirical study on its meaning deconstruction.This study is targeted to investigate the following three issues:(1)the meaning deconstruction of Chinese puns in a real process of interpretation;(2)the influence exerted by the cognitive factors(similarity and context)in a real process of interpretation;and(3)the difference on the operating cognitive conditions among four types of Chinese puns.Employing theoretical analysis and questionnaire survey,this study conducts both qualitative and quantitative analyses on the meaning deconstruction of 30 Chinese puns selected from news headlines in Beijing Daily from June 2007 to June 2016.With respect to the questionnaire survey,it mainly examines the comprehension strategies employed in the process of meaning deconstruction among 300 high-school students in Hangzhou.The major findings of this study are listed as follows.In a real interpretative process,Chinese puns are not able to be completely construed,and the reasons underlying are assumed to be individual differences and difficulty of materials.In addition,similarity and context do have an tremendous influence on a real interpretative process,which meets the ideas stated in Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory.Furthermore,it is found that the influence exerted by cognitive conditions in the case of four types of Chinese puns differs.Specifically speaking,similarity occupies the dominant role in the process of meaning deconstruction of phonetic and semantic puns while context takes up the leading position in metaphorical and gra,matical puns.Naturally,there exist exceptions,which mainly gather in phonetic and semantic puns.They are observed to be the consequences of the absence of participants’ awareness of similarity in pronunciation and the manners of the formation of double meanings of semantic puns.The research findings will be helpful to enrich the empirical study on Chinese puns from the perspective of cognition,and may also offer insights into the creating of news headlines with Chinese puns.