A Complementary Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory And Relevance Theory On Text-image Relation

The combination of text and image has had a long history.New ways of combination brought by the development of technology and society require a fresh way of studying the relation between text and image.Theoretical development,specifically,Cognitive Linguistics,meets the requirement.As a cognition-oriented multimodality study,this thesis delves into two interdependent research questions:First,what is the relation between text and image of headlines in discourse like WeChat public accounts?Second,how can we analyze the meaning construction in headlines combined with text and image from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT)and Relevance Theory(RT)?Employing the method of qualitative analysis and complemented by interview to give empirical evidence,the thesis will first argue that the text-image headline belongs to ostensive-inferential communication,and thus assume text and image are optimally relevant,or trying to be so if they fail,according to RT.Then results from interview will be used to testify the assumption.We revisit the advantages and disadvantages of CBT and RT,and then analyze the similarities and differences of these two theories.The advantages of each make it possible to extend them to other modes than verbal communication only,and the disadvantages imply their need for development instead of being employed directly.The similarities and differences are two sides of the same coin and lay the basis for cautious complementation,and such complementation,as can be seen in the thesis,is helpful for the improvement of each.After arguing the broader application of CBT and RT and their complementarity,this thesis builds a tentative interpretative and meaning construction cognitive model in the framework of CBT complemented by RT to illustrate meaning construction in the text and image of headlines.This model will be used to examine the examples of headlines from People's Daily public account,an authoritative and representative public account.The argument that text and image are(trying to be)optimally relevant represents the nature of text and image relation with the cognitive perspective.The interpretative and meaning construction cognitive model combining CBT and RT is not only contributive to the understanding on the meaning of text-image combination,but facilitates the development of these two theories.Based on those theoretical analysis and case studies,we suggest a better way of combining text and image headlines of WeChat public accounts,which is also enlightening to similar social and informative application in practice.There are two innovations in this study:1)it takes an initiative in applying two complementary theories to analyze the text-image relation of in an emergent discourse,ie.,headlines of WeChat public accounts;2)it furthers the study on CBT and RT and their complementarity.