An Interpretation Of Mexican Immigration News Discourse From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

This thesis studies the Mexican immigration news discourse, with the theoretical background of Conceptual Blending Theory, to elaborate its blending process of meaning construction of Mexican immigration news discourse basing on sufficient amount of statistics on The Los Angels Times and Fox News. Generally speaking, being the largest immigration group in the United States, Mexican immigration, which is of great academic and realistic significance, has exerted a great influence both on the United States and Mexico, especially in the Midterm Election of this year. It is worthy of studying Mexican immigrants as American two parties’attitudes toward Mexican immigrants are enlarged by the Midterm Election. Due to its large circulation, news English has a large amount of language phenomena which is deserved to be analyzed. However, up to now, researches on news discourse mainly focus on stylistic, functional or critical analytic studies, which leave a place of systemic study on the dynamic cognitive analysis of news discourse.On account of this thesis, cognitive process of interpreting meaning construction of news discourse is more of an open dynamic non-linear meaning construction which involved in both non-linguistic and linguistic information rather than a simple linear input-output process. Besides, on purpose of using some words, journalistic prefer to take advantage of readers’ open dynamic interpretative process to trigger their meaning construction mechanism. To sum up, this thesis aims to reveal the hidden information which Mexican immigration news discourse is intended to convey by probing into the dynamic linguistic information and static long-term memory in the blending process in light of Conceptual Blending Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner.The major findings of the thesis as follow:Firstly, the backstage cognitive of interpreting is also a process of conceptual blending, which involves the on-line blending of conceptual model with different cognitive models as well as some elements from different mental spaces, rather than simply mappings between source domain to target domain. During the process of conceptual blending, it involves a series of conceptual meanings and background information. Therefore, for the same event, different wording of a piece of news lead to different associations for readers. Secondly, during the process of interpreting, the acceptability of a piece of news is relied on the readers’ conceptual blending ability. To some degree, the process of interpreting meaning construction of news discourse is not a static procedure but a cognitive process in which conceptual meaning and background information are interrelated and interactive continually.