The Application of Cognitive Linguistics in Interpreting Characters’ Psychology in English Literature

Abstract

The inner thoughts of characters in English literary works are embedded in textual details such as dialogues, actions and environmental descriptions. Traditional literary analysis mostly relies on superficial plotlines and subjective aesthetic judgments, which easily leads to subjectively biased interpretations and vague analytical logic. Centered on universal human cognitive mechanisms, cognitive linguistics encompasses five core sub-theories: Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Mental Space Theory, Figure-Ground Theory, Conceptual Integration Theory and Prototype Theory. Taking human cognitive thinking patterns as an objective tool for text interpretation, this theoretical system can construct a complete analytical path from linguistic symbols to characters’ subconsciousness, emotions and motivations. Based on the core theories of cognitive linguistics, this paper designs a standardized process for analyzing characters’ psychology with case studies of classic British and American novels. Five sets of data tables are adopted to quantitatively compare the interpretative differences between traditional literary analysis and cognitive linguistic analysis, which clearly demonstrate the practical value of cognitive linguistics in capturing implicit emotions of characters, exploring deep-seated psychological motivations and unifying the logic of textual interpretation. Balancing academic rigor and accessible expression, this paper adopts clear subjects for all sentences and short sentences to decompose complex logic, lowering the threshold for understanding professional theories. The research results prove that introducing cognitive linguistics into the analysis of characters in English literature can reduce subjective bias in literary interpretation, and provide an objective, applicable and repeatable analytical paradigm for classroom teaching and literary criticism research of English literature.