Discourse Comprehension And Coherence Based On Emotional Mental Spaces

Emotional meaning plays an important role in discourse comprehension. It is of theoretical significance and important application value to deeply.reveal readers’ specific cognitive processes in mind when they comprehend emotions in discourse. However, traditional literary analysis regards emotions in discourse as rhetorical effects and results of artistic expressions with internal comprehension processes neglected. Psychological linguistics and computational linguistics treat them as direct interpretation or reasoning, equating propositional information with comprehension results. Cognitive poetics reveals that it is the tangible emotional responses that are triggered by emotional comprehension in discourse, which will adversely affect the comprehension processing of discourse. In this process, readers’ self-concept and emotional experience play a vital part. But what previous studies lack is the specific discussion of internal processes on these phenomena.Mental spaces and conceptual integration theory (MSCI for short) target describing and explaining online meaning construction. Recently, researches on poetry, novels and super-long texts by means of MSCI are constantly emerging, which have been making lots of contributions to discourse interpretation. However, as Freeman (2006) pointed out that describing and explaining emotions in discourse is still in the blank. This dissertation attempts to solve two problems by means of MSCI:the first one is the online process involved in the comprehension of emotional meaning; the second one is the impact of these processes on mental coherence in discourse.To bridge the gap, this study defines emotion as an episode on the basis of the recent development of cognitive science, and analyzes the basic departments and mental components of emotional process and the relationships among these ingredients according to the episode model of emotions. Then, the on-line emotional meaning construction in discourse comprehension is analyzed with examples, which distinguishes different emotional mental spaces according to their mental mechanism. Particularly, integration processes involved in on-line emotional meaning construction in discourse comprehension are probed, including the nature of cognitive operation and vital relations such as selective mappings, etc. Furthermore, an experiment is conducted to investigate the understanding differences under the condition of different emotional prompts. Finally we analyze the connecting and nested relation between emotional mental spaces formed through on-line emotional meaning construction in discourse comprehension and the corresponding conceptual integration process with examples. More than that, the differences are compared between mental coherence in discourse taken shape by emotional mental spaces and their conceptual integration processes and the structure formed by traditional discrete factors like time, space, cause-effect. What’s more, this paper attempts to analyze medium and macroscopic structure of discourse from the perspective of emotions.The findings of this research are concluded as the following:Firstly, the comprehension process must contain conceptual integration process of activating long-term memory to build up experiential space, and the fusion of experiential space and narrative space to shape into blended space. Blended space demonstrates the emergent property of emotional mental space in the case of emotional arousals excluded and included."Event cognition-emotion" relation,"emotion-consequent behavior" relation and "emotion-cognitive color" relation are the very vital relations in the comprehension process of emotions. These vital relations are the cognitive mechanism of "emotion-cognition" interaction."Emotion-cognition" interactive mechanism is the specific mechanism of cognitive operation (including composition, completion, elaboration and so on) in emotional mental space. It makes emotional and narrative description in discourse mutually nurish and promote to manifest the gestalt effect (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.), engendering rich beyond literal meanings and two-way value-added pragmatic effect.Secondly, It is demonstrated that "event cognition-emotion" relation,"emotion-consequent behavior" relation,"emotion-cognitive color" relation and emotional contrast structure make emotional information in discourse (often constructed beyond literally) and rich narrative content naturally joint together, and unite characters, scenes, events, etc., in related contents. Emotion executes functions of reference, consistency, governace, reason, and integration in these joints. On the macroscopic level, emotions activated in online discourse processing by the reader can implement functions of compression, generalization, mark and layout, etc. for information in discourse to form global thematic impression of discourse and outline structure. The coherent relationship and structure ground on emotional mental space system is a new way to take shape coherent discourse and structure different from general cognitive factors, such as time, space, logic, comparison, analogy. It manifests the dominance of emotional processing and special gestalt mental representation in discourse by "emotion-cognition" interactive mechanism.In general, this research explains specific emotional meaning by the use of the integrated relationship between emotional arousals and cognitive processing to build up the compositional view of emotional comprehension. It classifies "event cognition-emotion" relation, emotion-consequent behavior" relation,"emotion-cognitive color" relation and emotional contrast structure on the strength of the analysis of emotional process to form a unified theoretical framework, based on which we analyze on-line meaning construction and coherent structure of emotional discourse. It also points out the necessity of conceptual integration in the process of emotional understanding in discourse, which makes emotional understanding embodied and achieves gestalt comprehension effect through interaction between cognition and emotion. What’s more, it proposes a new perspective of discourse coherence, namely emotional mental spaces, to analyze local, medium and macroscopic structure of coherence, and then discovers the independent structural system of implicity, depth, high order and integration in emotional discourse. Accordingly, the above innovative work in this study extends the application of MSCI and enriches the explanation of Cognitive Linguistics to discourse structure and coherence. What’s more, this study also attempts to testify MSCI with empirical evidences.The main limitation of this study is focusing on static discourse. In addition, the analyzing materials are confined to Chinese and lack multilingual contrast and comparison. Future research should further discuss interactive discourse analysis and contrast and comparison of cross-cultural communication.