An Inquiry Into Meaning Construction Of Puns In The London Olympics Chinese And English News Headlines From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

In2012, London presented a wonderful Olympics for people all over the world. During the London Olympic Games, a variety of media at home and abroad gave it an all-round coverage. In order to attract people’s attention, the media laid emphasis on news headlines. Therefore, some figures of speech were adopted to keep these news headlines more vivid, novel and meaningful. Pun is one of the figures of speech used in news headlines. In history, pun has been widely applied to people’s daily conversations, advertisements, riddles, news headlines and so on, and it has attracted the attention of linguists, who have expounded the definition, classification, rhetorical features, pragmatic functions, translation skills, etc. from the rhetorical, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive perspectives. In recent years, studies have been done on the Olympic Games news headlines. This paper aims to study puns in the2012London Olympic Games news headlines (hereafter LOGNHs), which is still a gap in the field of linguistic research.On the basis of Conceptual Blending Theory (hereafter CBT) in cognitive linguistics, this paper, adopting qualitative and quantitative methods, analyzes meaning construction of puns collected from Chinese and English newspapers, websites and so on. It attempts to give a reasonable account of how puns in the2012LOGNHs make sense, and then further to explore the cognitive mechanisms and conditions of successful interpretation of puns and their cognitive functions in the LOGNHs.CBT provides a powerful explanation for meaning construction of puns in the2012LOGNHs. Firstly, double meanings of a pun can activate two different mental spaces, namely, Input space I and II. Then, cross-space mappings of some elements from two input spaces based on similarity produce common abstract structures of the two spaces. This schematic information, serving as a basis for building up cross-space mappings between the two input spaces, is projected into the generic space. At last, elements and structures of two input spaces are selectively projected into the blended space, and then an emergent structure, that is, the implication of the news headlines, will be generated by means of composition, completion and elaboration, and consideration of background knowledge. Armed with CBT, people can interpret puns in the2012LOGNHs successfully.The major findings of the study can be summarized as follows:1. Four classifications of puns are identified in the2012LOGNHs, which are phonetic, semantic, grammatical and idiomatic puns.2. Conceptual blending and association by similarity serve as the cognitive mechanisms of meaning construction of puns in the LOGNHs.3. Similarity and context are the cognitive conditions of puns interpretation.4. The cognitive functions of puns in the LOGNHs are identified as highlighting the theme of news and realizing the compelling value of news headlines, enhancing the readability and memorization of news headlines, stimulating imagination and achieving the guiding function of news headlines, and facilitating the interpretation of news editors’attitudes toward Olympic athletes.This paper applies CBT in cognitive linguistics to the analysis of meaning construction of puns in the LOGNHs, hoping to contribute to the interpretation of puns in news report and to promote studies on cognitive science.