Text World Theory And Interpretation Of Artistic Conceptions In Li Shang-yin’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

The text-world theory, coined by Paul Werth, has its own theoretical framework, improved by Joanna Gavins with its absorption from other cognitive theories such as mapping, schema, frame, blending etc since it originated from possible worlds created by Leibniz. It makes use of the previous experience to see how people perceive things and events outside and tries to get out their mental representations. At this point, it has something in common with other cognitive theories so it is affected greatly by context like others. Li Shang-yin, an eminent poet in late Tang Dynasty, got the reputation for his poetry’s properties in poetic language like implicitness, ambiguity of themes, and rich imagination. Among his hundreds of poems, poetry about chanting objects, love and historic events is the most recognized by people. Within the text-world theory, three layers are operated to analyze those three themes respectively to explore the mental representations of artistic conceptions as well as the way they are formed. At the discourse-world level, based on the common ground originating from shared knowledge, the paper aims at the artistic conceptions of poetry chanting objects in which the poet has lofty characters of denying darkness and decay of the society. It is the text-driven mechanism that gets people to choose the necessary information from all knowledge stored in mind about a specific object. At the text-world level, world-builders contain time, location, objects and characters which set up a general boundary of the text world to hold its inner content. Function-advancing propositions push a plot forward and they can have material, relational and mental processes according to predications. Material processes refer to dynamic actions and events; relational ones work for statement or description and mental ones are used to convey how people conceive and think about external things by human sense. Love poetry as a main object at this part rarely contains only one text world but the main text world is chosen for the exploration of the poet’s love and miss-sickness. Sub-worlds (including deictic world, attitudinal world, and epistemic world) depart from the originating world and theoretically, each sub-world contributes to an artistic conception. Within deictic worlds, the deictic parameters take place such as the shifts of time, location, objects and characters. Attitudinal worlds deal with man’s desire, want and purposes while epistemic worlds handle people’s perception about things with its possibility spanning from sound certainty to loss of confidence. In his historic poetry as a way to express his political ideas, all sorts of sub-worlds are under test for artistic conceptions and there must be kind of mechanism between worlds to advance the poem content to form the general conceptual configuration.