| Folk songs are the connections of the working masses’wisdomin the process of long-term labor practice of human, reflecting thelocal people’s experiences and real feelings. So folk songs are ofgreat value to the study of society and the development of humancivilization, and help people to understand the culture, history, and folkcustom of a region or a people. Meanwhile they are the base of nationalmusic. Folk song lyrics are a special language phenomenon that has beenpaid much attention to by a lot of scholars. Traditionally, folk songs usedto be researched from the perspectives of musicology, aesthetics,stylistics and rhetoric, etc. but few scholars pay attention to the meaningconstruction of metaphorical lyrics. This thesis tries to analyze themetaphorical lyrics from the perspective of Conceptual IntegrationTheory for the purpose of creation of practice as well as people’s betterappreciation of folk songs.Hunan folk songs have experienced a long history with a varietyof types such as Shan Ge, Hao Zi and Xiao Diao, and theircharacteristics are different. Some of them are loud and clear, mildand indirect, humorous and pungent, which reflect different thoughts,feelings, ideas and wishes of the local people. This thesis choosesfolk songs in Hunan as the object of study mainly because theycontain rich extra words, metonymies and allusions, of which themetaphorical lyrics are given a detailed study in the meaningconstruction for people’s better comprehension of the artisticconception of folk songs. Meanwhile, the study can provide new usefor reference for cognitive linguistics theory, and can also broaden the scope of study and extend the research of Conceptual IntegrationTheory.This thesis attempts to research the meaning construction of themetaphorical folk lyrics from the perspective of ConceptualIntegration Theory (CIT) of Gills Fauconnier and Mark Turner, andanalyzes the metaphorical lyrics from the CIT types. Chapter Onegenerally reviews the Conceptual Integration Theory, metaphor and songlyrics. Chapter Two introduces the Conceptual Integration and metaphoras well as the relevant theories. In addition, this thesis introduces thedefinition, characteristics and classification of metaphor, and carries ontargeted research of folk song lyrics, embodying the dynamic mentalprocess of people’s appreciation of folk songs fully. Meanwhile, sometypical examples are taken to analyze the theories to prove thefeasibilities of using the cognitive linguistic theory in study of lyrics.Chapter Three makes a study of the song lyrics selected from the Hunanfolk songs. In this chapter, the thesis introduces the definition,characteristics and classification of folk songs as well as the artisticvalues and social values, and briefly outlines Hunan folk songs and thefeatures. Then this chapter interprets the metaphorical song lyrics fromthe perspective of CIT Network type, further proving the feasibilities ofadopting the Conceptual Integration Theory to interpret the metaphoricalfolk song lyrics.It is found by the thesis that CIT is very important in cognitivelinguistic theory. The process of Conceptual Integration is dynamic, andCIT has powerful interpretation of how the meaning construction indifferent language forms. Many scholars have adopted CIT to interpretdifferent language phenomenon, but seldom did they interpret the meaning construction of metaphorical song lyrics, especially in folk songlyrics. This thesis attempts to interpret the metaphorical folk song lyricsfrom the perspective of CIT Network type, achieving the goal that CITcan interpret the metaphorical song lyrics and help people betterappreciate the folk songs in dynamic mental process. Therefore, it isfurther proved that CIT has promotion effect to the understanding ofoutside world and powerful interpretation of different languagephenomenon. Meanwhile, this thesis still has some inadequacies. Thoughthe selected data is typical, it can’t represent the folk songs completely,for folks songs have their own characteristics. There are some differencesbetween the folk songs in different regions, and this thesis only choosesthe folk songs in Hunan. What’s more, the folk songs in different parts inHunan may be different from each other, so the selected folk songs can’treflect all the characteristics of folk songs in China. To prove theuniversality of the interpreting power of Conceptual Integration Theory,more quantitative analysis is needed. Moreover, the lyrics of a piece offolk song can be analyzed by several kinds of Conceptual IntegrationNetwork, but this thesis only focuses on the representative CIT Networktype. |
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