A Cognitive Approach To Default Meaning On Conceptual Blending Theory

As the foundation of conversational implicature,Grice's conversational implicature theory plays a significant role in linguistics,but his strict classification of communicative contents into what is said and what is implied led to the failure of the explanation for the pragmatic elements in what is said,under which post-Gricean pragmatists proposed different interpretative models of default meaning to study conversational implicature.Default meaning is automatic meaning with different degrees of contexts dependence.However,most of the linguists made different analyses of default meaning from the perspective of conventionality of language,such as Levinson and Recanati.Therefore,on the basis of the achievements of the former linguists,this study attempts to explore the cognitive mechanism of default meaning from the perspective of cognition to make further research on the generation and comprehension mechanisms of default meaning in conversational implicature.Developed from the theory of mental space and the theory of conceptual metaphor,the conceptual blending theory(CBT)whose four mental spaces are operated to the analysis of the meaning construction of natural language through cross-space mapping,selective projection,and three operations-composition,completion,and elaboration in the blending space,proposed by Fauconnier.The blending space is a dynamic and creative cognitive activity in conceptual blending theory.Under the guidance of cognitive linguistics,this study deeplyanalyzes the internal cognitive mechanism of default meaning in conversational implicature.In default meaning generation,based on the different degrees of dependence on context,the speaker triggers the generation of default meaning through activation,composition,completion and elaboration.In conceptual blending theory,mental spaces are established by the cognitive models in different conceptual domains and the different degrees of dependence on context,showing that the higher the similarities of the cognitive models established by different conceptual domains are,the less the cognitive efforts of the speaker will be paid,the more easily the default meaning can be comprehended.In a word,the research reveals the cognitive mechanism of default meaning and provides a new attempt for studies on default meaning from the perspective of cognition.