A Conceptual-blending Approach To Meaning Construction Of "Jimo" Structure

After the sentence“哥吃的不是面,是寂寞(what I am eating is not noodles, but loneliness)" made its appearance in Baidu Tieba(百度贴吧)at the very beginning of July, 2009, a sentence pattern has developed out of it and has instantly become popular among various Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), personal blogs and even major newspapers and magazines. This sentence pattern takes the syntactic form of "NP+V+的不是A,是B”,and is called "Jimo" structure. At the same time, "Jimo" structure has also attracted the interest of many linguistic researchers, whose studies have provided us with a good understanding of the structure. Nevertheless, most of the studies are devoted to a static description and analysis of the structure in terms of its syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features and few have tried to account for its meaning construction and the cognitive mechanism implied. On the whole, they failed to achieve a profound understanding of "Jimo" structure.On the other hand, as an important part of cognitive linguistics enterprise, conceptual blending theory concentrates primarily on on-line language generation and interpretation, namely, on-line language meaning construction, which definitely belongs to a more dynamic approach (Wang Wenbin,2004). As a result, the theory of conceptual blending will provide us with a new perspective to approach "Jimo" structure and ultimately with a profound understanding of the structure. Conceptual blending theory has advanced a rounded analysis framework—the conceptual integration network, which typically consists of four mental spaces, namely, input space 1, input space 2, a generic space and a blended space. These spaces are closely connected and interactive with each other. The two input spaces are connected to each other through partial cross-space mapping, and then the structures and elements in the inputs are selectively projected into the blended space, where they undergo the cognitive operations of composition, completion and elaboration to generate emergent structure."Jimo" structures are divided into two types according to the different meanings they express:the eliminating "Jimo" structure and the obtaining "Jimo" structure. In the present study, we have the meaning constructions of both types analyzed within the conceptual integration network by way of illustration. The analyses show that their meaning construction processes are almost the same while the main difference lies in the different meanings generated in the generic spaces. In addition, the analyses also reveal some characteristics of the meaning construction processes shared by the two types of "Jimo" structures. For example, the processes are highly context-dependent, and then conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor are both involved in the processes.Approaching "Jimo" structure from the theory of conceptual blending not only enables us to achieve a profound understanding of "Jimo" structure,but also encourages more cognitive studies on other novel linguistic phenomena. On the other hand, this study will further demonstrate the great explanatory power of conceptual blending theory and enrich its research scope as well.