A Cognitive Construal On The English Oxymoron From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

As a figure of speech,English oxymoron often crops up in classical literary works.However,the English oxymoron is not only a rhetorical device,but also one of the cognitive ways of human's understanding about complex construal of physics,psychology and society.So the thesis introduces English oxymoron into the field of cognitive linguistics.Oxymoron refers to the conjunction of two opposite or contradictory words expresses a seemingly contradictory,but actually unified meaning,creating a special language effect,which leads to a deeper reflection.The two words represent two different categories and the boundary of them is fuzzy.So this article adopts the conceptual blending theory to explore how these two categories are integrated together and how they are understood.The three conceptual mapping frameworks of conceptual blending theory provide an operational construal mechanism for cognize the fuzzy events characterized by oxymoron.The construal frame of oxymoron depends on the state of nature of oxymoron and the elements of communicative context.Context plays the role of semantic regulation and filtering of information needed.There are all exist contradictory states when people cognize things,behaviors,emotions and abstract phenomena.Some scholars have classified the English oxymoron on the basis of the traditional linguistics previously.This paper mainly summarizes the eight categories of them,and all their analysis are founded upon the conceptual network model.All these analysis follows by the construction of the models for the semantic representation network of English oxymoron.The application of context theory,category theory and fuzzy semantic theory find their full expression in explicating the fuzziness implying in the physical,mental and social world.The full text is divided into five chapters,and the structure is as follows: the Chapter 1 is the introduction,which introduces the background,purpose,significance and the framework of this study.The Chapter 2 reviews the achievements and shortcomings of domestic and foreign scholars in the study of English oxymoron from different perspectives,and points out the contents of this paper.The Chapter 3 provides the theoretical basis which unfolds the definition and types of oxymoron as well as the network categorization of the conceptual blending theory.The Chapter 4 constitutes the core part of the paper which introduces semantic representation network construction of English oxymoron from the perspective of conceptual blending theory and explores cognitive motivation of causing the presentation of oxymoron.The Chapter 5 is the conclusion,which mainly summarizes the main contents and contributions of this article.At the same time,it finds out the shortcomings,and puts forward the areas to be improved in the future.The findings go as follows:Firstly,according to the conceptual blending network model,how the two input spaces of the oxymoron integrated are analyzed and all input spaces or one of the input spaces controls the blended space is judged as well.Each type of English oxymoron on the basis of the traditional linguistics is corresponded to the different conceptual blending network models respectively.It is found that they can be well matched.Secondly,this study finds that different instances of oxymora reflect different semantic contents.The extraction of these semantic contents should be gone through the filtration of context factors and so on,and these factors result in some oxymora owing construal features of multiple model.Thirdly,all the cognitive operations of the instances are brought into effect with the filtering of indispensable contextual factors and completed by linguistic and cultural factors.Linguistic factors include the semantic content of the words in oxymoron,and the compositional order of these words reflects a certain cognitive order of people,that is,language iconicity.The cultural factors are made up of physical world,mental world and social world.All of these factors affect the semantic extraction of oxymoron jointly,so that some oxymora accord with a variety of network models.Fourthly,the two input spaces of English oxymoron represent different categories and the boundary of category is blurred.Language is the channel for people to express the inner world.In production and living practices,people would produce numerous ambivalent and complicated psychological experiences,which are mapped into the language units necessarily.Therefore,the semantics is fuzzy.The fuzziness of the category in people's physical world,psychological world and social world leads to the fuzziness of category representation of the fuzzy language.Therefore,this article explores the semantic fuzziness of different structure of oxymoron.English oxymoron is a special way of language expression.It is not only related to the cognitive semantics of traditional part of speech,but also closely associated with human's subjective psychology.This paper attempts to explore the structure of English oxymoron from the angle of conceptual blending,combining the context theory,fuzzy semantics theory and so on,and constructs the semantic representation network of each type of English oxymoron.These contents make up for what the scholars have not explained before,which can provide readers with a comprehensive perspective and deeper understanding.