Abstract
Puns have double meanings. Previous studies on how the two meanings are activated and integrated are far from justifiable or satisfactory. It is suggested in this paper that the Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) can be combined to solve this question. The GSH assumes that there are two distinct meaning access mechanisms, namely, the lexical access mechanism and contextual access mechanism. The double meanings of a pun are activated through the two mechanisms that run in parallel. However, the integration mechanisms of different types of puns are inconsistent, and it is the differences in the mechanisms that account for the intrinsic reasons why puns are divided into three types.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lu, C., Wang, G. (2013). A Study on the Interpreting Mechanisms of Puns. In: Liu, P., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8229. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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