The Study Of The Dynamic Process Of The Meaning Construction Of Personification

Personification is an important figure of speech and it is widely used among people. However, up to now, the study of personification has not drawn enough attention of the scholars. At present, there is no Master's thesis or Doctoral dissertation focusing on the study of personification. And most of those existing journal of writings are mainly discussions about the source, classification and anthropomorphic technique of personification from the static angle. It is worthy of mentioning that all these studies cannot reveal the dynamic process of the emergent meaning of personification.Then, what is the dynamic process of the meaning construction of personification? How do people interpret the meaning of personification? Based on the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) and Marked Iconicity, a new framework CBT+ is proposed in this thesis to reveal the dynamic process of the construction of personification. In this research, we will choose Aesop's Fables as the main data. It is found that the dynamic process of the construction of personification not only include the mapping of the two input spaces and the generic space but the promotion of Marked Iconicity as well. Simply speaking, the process of people's interpreting towards personification is like this: input space one and input space two map onto the generic space and this will produce a so-called emergent structure with its emergent meaning which will show a meaning contradiction, but this contradiction will stimulate a screening activity in people's mind. In this screening activity, the meaning of personification will be recombined, and the process of recombining is actually the process of the constructing of the dynamic process of personification with the participant of Marked Iconicity.The results of this study also conclude the following two subordinate aspects: firstly, based on the previous research, we will propose new notion on the problem of tanglesome classification standards, and classify five main categories of personification; secondly, the artistic characteristics of the personification in Aesop's Fables will be summed up.