A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis Of Oxymoron

Natural language can be considered as a psychological phenomenon. Cognitive linguists incline to the view that language competence is a part of cognitive ability and application of language is interwoven with human cognitive activities. Besides, the application itself embodies cognitive ability. Figurative language, as a part of natural language, has an immediate effect on the way how we look at the world just as literal language. Oxymoron, as a figure of speech and a special collocation, has been the focus of psychologists, rhetoricians and linguists owing to its novelty and particularity. To the author's surprise, the study on oxymoron so far has limited itself to the respect of its structural features, social functions and translating methods. Few of the researchers have explored its meaning construction and the great influence that human cognitive ability exerts upon in the cognitive processes.This paper, taking mental space theory and frame-shifting theory as its theoretical foundation, tentatively interprets the cognitive processes of meaning construction of oxymoron. Fauconnier's mental space theory aims to examine the meaning construction process of language. This theory owns two advantages: 1.it reveals the dynamic semantic structure of lexemes and studies their ambiguities visually; 2.it breaks the traditional mode of the analysis of meaning construction and establishes simple space relations to drive complicated ones with a highlight of context, which conforms to the law of human cognition. Meanwhile, the demerits lie in the mental space theory as well since it fails to thoroughly analyze the interconnection of mental spaces and to fully interpret the operating mechanism of the system. On the other hand, fortunately, frame-shifting theory counteracts the weakness aforementioned. This theory maintains that language comprehension process involves two stages: at the first stage, a conventional, default frame will be activated; at the second stage, a new frame will be activated if the default frame collides with the present utterance in order to blend with the new inputs. The significance of this theory is that it studies the blending process between the input information and the memorized information. However, this theory fails to better expound that people are capable of recognizing new things and concepts and constructing new scenes. In spite of the respective disadvantages of mental space theory and frame-shifting theory, to the author's amazement, the two theories are complementary for the reason that mental space theory remedies the defect that frame-shifting theory ignores the important role of context and human cognitive ability while frame-shifting theory counteracts the weakness that mental space theory neglects the blending process of inputs.Through the analysis above, the author proposes Implicit Space-shifting Model aiming at better revealing the construction of inner contradictory meaning in oxymoron and the mental processes of eradicating the contradiction and reaching a harmony. The model assumes the following viewpoints: i. the inconsistency in the proposition of oxymoron is reflected by the conflict between the explicit output and the implicit context; ii. two contrastive semantic components are mutually dependent and influential; iii. the comprehensive process of oxymoron is a dynamic blending process; iv. the cognitive process of oxymoron will generate two blended spaces with different qualities which are named complementary space and replaceable space respectively. This model will be conducive to interpreting the cognitive processes of other figures of speech such as paradox, irony, and hyperbole.