摘 要

《红楼梦》是清代作家曹雪芹的巨作，也是中国古典四大名著之一。书中这些反映主要人物命运的神奇有趣的灯谜引起了读者的深度思考，更让许多的文学家以及语言学家进行了广泛的研究。本文主要通过运用认知语言学的两大主要理论：语言的具身哲学和概念隐喻来对书中第22回的灯谜进行分析，从而使读者对本书中的人物及情节有更深的理解。

关键词： 《红楼梦》；灯谜；认知语言学；具身哲学；隐喻

Contents1. Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------------12. Demonstration-------------------------------------------------------------------------------22.1 Embodied philosophy----------------------------------------------------------------------3 2.1.1 Definition of embodied philosophy -----------------------------------------------3 2.1.2 An analysis of embodied philosophy in lantern riddles-------------------------4 2.1.2.1 The framework of the lantern riddles about objects --------------------4 2.1.2.2 The process of making lantern riddles-------------------------------------5 2.1.2.3 The text of lantern riddles----------------------------------------------------72.2 Conceptual Metaphor-----------------------------------------------------------------------9 2.2.1 Definition of conceptual metaphor-------------------------------------------------9 2.2.2 A Cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphor in lantern riddles-----------------12 2.2.2.1 The process of making and guessing lantern riddles----------------------12 2.2.2.2 The fates mapping of the main characters----------------------------------13 2.2.2.3 The metaphor writing style of author---------------------------------------17Conclusion--------------------------------------------------------------------------------18

Works Cited--------------------------------------------------------------------------------20

Bibliography-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------21

A Cognitive Analysis of Lantern Riddles in A Dream of Red Mansions

1. Introduction

Cao Xueqin (1715 ~1764) was one of the most famous novelists and poets in the history of Chinese literature. Born in an influential bureaucratic family, he had high cultural accomplishments and outstanding competence for art. Nonetheless, his house was confiscated and his family sank to the rock bottom of the society later. However, adversity brought talent in return. It was when he was plunged in such an embarrassing circumstance that he had the opportunity to know the underprivileged of the society, thus giving him specific, intense experience, and enabling himself to see essences of life. He spent as recorded, at least ten years busying with the production of the novel. The novel originally entitled The Story of the Stone, also known as A Dream of Red Mansions, has 80 chapters finished. The rest 40 chapters are believed to have been added by Gao E, the most successful person among those who tries to complete the masterpiece.

A Dream of the Red Mansions is seen as a great realistic masterpiece among the Chinese classic novels which describes the daily depletion of Family Jia and the final bankruptcy of the influential family that had enjoyed a hundred years' prosperity in detail, reveals the complicated contradictions of the feudal society family, performance of the feudal marriage, morality, culture, education, and decadent, degenerate and creates series of nobility civilians and the tragic image of slave women who has demonstrated an extremely broad typical feudal society real-life environment. At the same time, sang ebullient praises of both the male and female youths who were considered heretical in pursuit of love. Therefore nearly every aspect of this book has received wide attention, especially the interesting and mysterious lantern riddles in this masterpiece. Theses lantern riddles always arouse the further thinking of readers and various researches of literature experts as well as linguists. These lantern riddles are beneficial to shaping the images of characters, and describing the personalities of characters. In addition, they also reflect the fates of the main characters. This lays the foundation for the reader to forecast the development of the plot. It is also beneficial to adding the tragic atmosphere to the book. So, many people try to analyze these lantern riddles by focusing on the functions of them. Studies of the lantern riddles from the perspective of cognitive linguistics are much less. However, there are more and more people applying cognitive linguistics as basic theory to the literature analysis. Many people use cognitive linguistics to analyze some poems, images, and texts. Therefore, this thesis will try to analyze the lantern riddles in 22nd chapter from two main theories of cognitive linguistics, the embodied philosophy and conceptual metaphor. To put it specifically, this thesis will be divided into two main parts. The first chapter deals with the embodied philosophy, including the brief introduction of this theory, then from the framework and the process of making lantern riddles and the text to analyze the riddles. The second part focuses on the conceptual metaphor, and introduces the definition of it, thus showing the function of conceptual metaphor in these lantern riddles.

2. Demonstration

Cognitive linguistics is an approach to the analysis of natural language that originates in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the works of George Lakoff, Ron Langacker, and Len Talmy, and that focuses on language as an instrument for organizing, processing, and conveying information.

Within cognitive linguistics, language is seen as a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of meaningful categories that helps us deal with new experiences and store information about old ones. Dirk Geeraerts stresses that there are three fundamental characteristics of cognitive linguistics: “the primacy of semantics in linguistic analysis, the encyclopedic nature of linguistic meaning, and the perspectival nature of linguistic meaning” (2007, p. 5). Among all of them, the primacy of semantics in linguistic analysis is the most important, suggesting that meaning be the primary linguistic phenomenon, which is the central topic in cognitive linguistics.