The Study Of Generating Mechanism Of Transferred Epithet Within The AMF Framework

As a supernormal collocation, transferred epithet is a rhetorical device which is frequently used in literary works as well as in daily expressions. By virtue of its aesthetic effects, this seemingly illogical collocation has attracted many scholars of various fields such as rhetoricians, psychologists and linguists. However, most of the previous studies of transferred epithet focus on its identification, classification, aesthetic function, psychological basis, comprehension mechanism, etc. and few of them explore the generating mechanism of transferred epithet. In view of this, the present thesis attempts to propose the Autonomy-dependency Metonymy Analytical Framework (AMF for short), which is primarily based on the linguistic theory of the Autonomy-dependency Analytical Framework (ADF) and conceptual metonymy, in the hope of giving a satisfactory explanation of the formation of transferred epithet.With reference to the former studies, this paper concludes four characteristics of transferred epithet: (1) a supernormal collocation which is based on the association of contiguity; (2) the transference of an epithet or a modifier (usually an adjective or a descriptive phrase); (3) the modifier corresponds to two modified terms, i.e. the illogical modified(MI for short) and the modified that the epithet really modifies(MR); (4) the epithet constrains the MR semantically. According to AMF, each transferred epithet consists of explicit expression and implicit expression, which is the alignment of autonomy and dependency. It also stresses the important role of intentionality in utterance generation. This framework, however, is inadequate in that it fails to find out the reason why an epithet or a modifier still has semantic constraint on the MR after being transferred to the MI. As a matter of fact, conceptual metonymy occurs between the MI and the MR of a transferred epithet, which is guided by the intentionality. To put it another way, the ADF and the conceptual metonymy are complementary, serving as the prerequisite and supplement respectively. In light of the newly established framework, the production of transferred epithet can be described as: (i)the explicit expression of a transferred epithet is the dependency, while the corresponding implicit expression is the autonomy; (ii)through the proximity relation, the MI is derived from the MR and is treated as the entity of an ICM together with MR; (iii)under the guidance of the intentionality embodied in the autonomy, conceptual metonymy occurs between the MI and the MR, which is characterized by"MI FOR MR"; (iv)in the meantime, the modifier of the MR is transmitted to the MI by means of nipping-along. It might be the possible way in which a transferred epithet is formed.In addition, the present paper takes the transferred epithet in poetry as the main research object, for the compact language structure and highly concentrated meaning of poetry where transferred epithet is widely employed. According to the four characteristics mentioned above, 221 transferred epithets have been collected from 5813 poems both in Chinese and English as our closed corpus. After being applied to the data collected, the practicability of the framework AMF is proven, which is abided with statistics and ratios. Then we come to a conclusion that the generation of a transferred epithet which is guided by the intentionality involves not only the transference of the epithet or modifier, but also the conceptual metonymy which can be represented as"MI FOR MR", and the most frequently chosen ICM is the thing-and-part ICM, followed by the ICMs involving indeterminate relationships, the action ICM, the production ICM, the causation ICM as well as the containment ICM.