Understanding Metonymy

Metonymy, together with metaphor, is claimed to be the most widely used figure of speech. Unlike metaphor, which has been widely studied as an essential way of thinking in the past decades, metonymy has received far less attention, though it also plays an important role in human life and occurs frequently in language use.The paper begins by giving a brief survey on the traditional and rhetorical views of metonymy, then it points out that the traditional views restrict metonymy to the names of things, mere substitution of names, and real-world contiguity. On the above basis, the paper analyzes some modern cognitive ideas of metonymy, which has broadened our understanding of metonymy by delimiting the weaknesses of the traditional notions.The paper holds that metonymy should be interpreted not just as a matter of names but as a conceptual phenomenon, not as simply substituting one entity for another entity but as a cognitive process in which one more salient conceptual entity mentally accesses another entity, and not just as a type of language but as reflecting a significant form of human cognition. The notion of "contiguity" is not merely located in the world of reality but at the conceptual level and operating within one idealized cognitive model. Thus metonymy is quite diverse and exhibits itself in a variety of forms in language. In this paper, many metonymic uses, such as tautologies and the use of present tense, which are excluded from consideration in the traditional views, have been taken into account, thus revealing comprehensively the pervasive and fundamental characters of metonymy and the importance of metonymy in human thinking and reasoning as well as in daily language uses. The paper proposes that the understanding of metonymy relies heavily on our metonymic ways of thinking and reasoning. Since in communication, people tend to use the most salient aspect of an object, idea, or event to referto the object, idea, or event as a whole, the understanding of metonymy must mainly involve the recognition of the salient part of an object, idea, or event as a whole. This infer-whole-from-part mode of thinking and reasoning speeds our cognition of the whole world, quickens the process of reasoning and makes it possible to promote the efficiency in communication, and moreover, it provides much better explanations as to why people draw conversational implicatures quickly in dialogues. In this sense, the paper concludes that metonymy is not only an economical way of expressing but also a very powerful and efficient tool for resolving difficult problems in communication.