A Conceptual Blending Perspective On Meaning Construction Of Fables

As a special literary genre,the fable plays an important role in the history of world literature.Its most striking feature is to use a simple and understandable story to explain an abstract object or profound truth,which makes it easy to understand.The essence of fable is making analogy,that is,metaphor.Aesop's Fables,as a classical western literature,is generally regarded as the oldest and most influential fable in the world.For more than two thousand years,with its unique life wisdom and artistic charm,it has won the admiration of people in different age from different countries,especially the young.At present,many scholars study fables from different angles.Some of the researches focus on its cultural value and regard it as an important education resource.Some pay attention to the rhetoric employed in the fable,while other researches resort to the comparative study between pre-Qin fables of China and Aesop's fables of ancient Greek.Meanwhile,with the rapid development of cognitive linguistics,some researches seek to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the analysis of fable meaning.Although it is proved that this theory owns its persuasiveness in explanation of fable meaning,it fails to disclose the online meaning construction process of fables.Hence,this article attempts to explore the online and dynamic meaning construction process when interpreting fables from a conceptual blending perspective to make up for the deficiencies of previous studies.Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT,for short)provides a theoretical framework for the studies of cognitive activities behind language.Based on Conceptual Blending Theory,this article illustrates the online meaning construction process and explains the hidden mental activities in fable reading by a qualitative research approach,in which 50 pieces of animal fables from Aesop's Fables published by Yi Lin Press is selected as research materials.The author attempts to work out the following questions:(1)What is the blending process of meaning construction in fables based on the conceptual blending network?(2)How do the four types of conceptual blending network work in the process of meaning construction of fables?The major findings of the study are summarized as follows: 1)Through analysis,it is found that the deduction of morals or profound meanings conveyed by fables results from integration of four mental spaces,including two input spaces,the generic space and the blended space,operated by cross-space mapping and selective projection.Meanwhile,it is proved that meaning construction process of animal fables in Aesop's Fables can be efficiently explained and displayed by the framework of CBT.2)among these collected data in Aesop's Fables,animal fables belonging to simplex network and single-scope network account for a small percentage while those belonging to mirror and double-scope network take up more.What's more,notwithstanding the different characteristics of different types of networks,meaning construction process still goes through three steps: composition,completion and elaboration.With regard to the significance of the study,three aspects are concerned: Firstly,this article explores the online meaning construction and the dynamic cognitive process of fables from a conceptual blending perspective,which offers a completely new perspective for the study of fables;secondly,by applying CBT to the analysis of fables,it turns out to be a worthy academic practice in the theory application;thirdly,It also offers readers a feasible way to show the mental reasoning process when reading fables,helping to improve readers' understanding and use of fables.