The Contrastive Study Of Metonymy In English And Chinese From The Cognitive Perspective

Metonymy, together with metaphor, is claimed to be the most widely used figure of speech. Traditional view claims that metonymy is merely an important figure of speech that operates on the name of things. From the eighties of last century, some cognitive linguists represented as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pointed out the weakness of the traditional notions, and they put forward the new cognitive view of metonymy. However, over the last two decades, metonymy has still got much less concern of linguists compared with metaphor.The paper tries to select metonymies in English and Chinese as the objects to make the contrastive study from cognitive perspective. By the study of the definitions, classifications, and the cognitive operating mechanisms of metonymy and the relations between metonymy and metaphor in English and Chinese, the paper tries to grasp the essence of metonymy and its operating state in English and Chinese, and get the further understanding of its connotation. The paper holds that metonymy is a pervasive cognitive model for all humankind, and it's a cognitive process and conceptual in nature.Just like metaphor, it's also a basic mode of our thought and the effective cognitive tool, and it also plays an important role in our life and occurs frequently in language use. Within the framework of Radden and Kovecses'(1999) systematic classification of metonymy and Lakoff's (1987) Idealized Cognitive Model theory (ICMs), the paper makes the contrastive study of the same and different metonymic models in English and Chinese, Meanwhile the motivations for the similarities and differences of metonymic models in English and Chinese are explored. Metonymic mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded on our bodily experiences, daily knowledge and also constrained by cultures. Due to the commonalities in bodily experiences, thinking process and some shared encyclopedia knowledge and social experiences, there are some universal similarities of metonymies in English and Chinese. Nevertheless, because of the differences between cultures, values, traditions, beliefs, living experiences, there exist differences between metonymies in English and Chinese. We hope that there will be further and deeper understanding of the metonymic studies in English and Chinese in the future, and to enrich the cognitive studies of metonymy. In practice, we hope to help the foreign language teaching and foreign--oriented Chinese teaching.