The Garden Path In Understanding Conundrums

As a form of riddles, conundrum is combined with language structure andmind, which has long attracted the attention of scholars in various fields. Whenpeople interpret conundrums, they always follow the mind-sets which is formed for along time and get into the routine thinking without referring to the key, which is thesame as the “garden path phenomenon”. Understanding of conundrums is closelyrelated with the psychological process of garden path because people undergo similarcognitive process during the interpretation. However, most of the previous studies ofriddles and conundrums are mainly carried out from the aspects of categorization,folklore, rhetoric, linguistics, cognitive-psychology, etc., while the internalmechanism of conundrums has seldom been discussed, let alone the close relations togarden path phenomena. What prompts the formation of conundrums? Whatpsychological process does a person undergo during the understanding of theconundrums? This thesis will focus on the internal mechanism of conundrum and thegarden path in understanding conundrums.In this thesis, the previous study of conundrums was reviewed firstly andfollowed by its limitations on the analysis and explanation of the conundrums. Thenprevious study of garden path phenomena has been concluded. Based on the analysisof the characteristics of the conundrums and garden path, and the previous researches,this thesis presents that the understanding of conundrums is actually a kind of gardenpath phenomenon, which bases on the universal human cognition: relevantadaptation model. When people interpret conundrums, they tend to get the maximalrelevance of cognition till find the way blocked, and then try another way. They findthat the apparent maximal relevance is a misunderstanding while the correct answeror the writers’ intention can only be found according to the cognitive context, theadaptation to the language structure, physical world, social world, and mental world.The apparent maximal relevance of conundrums is a misunderstanding approach while the covert optimal relevance is the ultimate approach. Only theapparent misunderstanding can produce final humorous effects. The garden pathunderstanding comes out firstly, under the cognitive context, is the result of theconsideration of the contrast of maximum relevance and optimal relevance, thepursuit of maximal contextual effects because the additional processing efforts isproportional to contextual effects; secondly, it is result of the dynamical adaptation tothe language structure, physical world, social world, and mental world, etc. First ofall, as a form of language game, during the creating process, people will adapt to thepolysemy feature of the basic vocabulary and syntactic structures to get rid of thethinking set. Secondly, in the physical word, spatial and temporal factors have acrucial impact on the linguistic choices. Thirdly, the range of social factors thatlinguistic choices are interadaptable has no principled limitation. Finally, languageinteraction is in fact the communication from mind to mind. The mental worldactivated in language use is adapted by the garden path understanding of conundrumsexactly.This thesis is a tentative analysis of the garden path understanding ofconundrums from pragmatic cognitive perspective. We hope that it can shed somelight on the relevant research on conundrums, garden path and relevant fields oflinguistics in the future.