An Analysis Of Cognitive Mechanism Of Puns In A Dream In Red Mansions Based On Relevance-integration Model

Cao Xueqin's A Dream in Red Mansions has a profound influence since Qing Dynasty,and it can be considered as the peak of Chinese classical novels.Cao is prominent in his magnanimous and prudent expressions,occupying an important position in literature.A great number of people claim that A Dream in Red Mansions is an encyclopedia of feudal society and an epitomization of traditional culture.In addition,the puns in this novel,which are considered as a kind of rhetoric style,have increasingly attracted a great number of linguists' attention.There are a great number of puns in this novel,mainly appearing as homophonic puns and “Bi Ci Shuang Guan”,the same with semantic puns or contextual puns.And they vary not only in form,but also in style,playing an important role in the development of story plot and the shape of characters.However,most of treatises in CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure)(1980-2017),which mostly connect with the translation method or thoughts of puns in A Dream in Red Mansions,neglect the cognitive mechanism of their implicit meaning's formation triggered by specific contextual assumptions,and the emergent space blended by relevant elements of explicit context,implicit context.In the process of research,the author does the research on some representative and relatively more complex puns in former 80 chapters written by Cao in this novel,applying the blending model of Conceptual-Integration Model(CIT)and Relevance Theory(RT),namely,Relevance-Integration Model(RIM)based on typical classification analysis.The author selects totally 10 puns in the novel.Among them,7 puns are from puns in Chapter One and Chapter Five's registers in the novel,which lead the guidance of the whole novel,forecast the final fates of protagonists.The left 3 are from latter chapters of the novel,which disclose Buddhist and Taoist culture.And they are in the form of medicine's name,poems and lantern riddles.Since CIT and RT are two influential theories,and most of the scholars apply them to analyzing the cognitive mechanism of puns,even though they have defects respectively.However,the defects themselves can not be neglected.On one hand,BT can not provide the relevant context for the formation of puns;On the other hand,RT only offers us some general and abstract principles on ostensive-inference model.Therefore,the author adopts Relevance-Integration Model(RIM),adding the inference process of input 2 and cognitive context in prominence,three elements of puns and some other related elements in RT(contextual assumption,prerequisite and implicit meaning)which are neglected by the former researches.The author analyzes the cognitive mechanism of puns in A Dream in Red Mansions in order to make readers have a clear idea in comprehending puns and related knowledge,and further to expound on the strong explanatory power of revised RIM not only in theory,but also in practice,such as complex forms requiring a number of cognitive efforts like poems or lantern riddles.Therefore,Relevance-Integration Model can also be applied in relatively simple interpretations of daily utterances,such as advertisements and communicative dialogues.