Study Of Metonymic Mechanism In Pragmatic Inference

Metonymy is traditionally viewed as a rhetorical device. With the development of the cognitive science, modern cognitive linguists think that metonymy is not merely a figure of speech. They think that metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon and that, as metaphor, it is a way of human cognition and thought. Cognitive linguistics and modern pragmatics share a number of objects of inquiry, although their theoretical assumptions are often at odds. Both fields are, among other things, concerned with the investigation of principles of language use, the conceptual and inferential nature of rhetorical devices and figures of thought such as metaphor and metonymy. Based on these ideas, we develop our idea to the level of methodology and argue that metonymy is of great importance in pragmatic inference in the understanding of utterance.We first review the theories of modern pragmatics on pragmatic inference and find that a characteristic of modern pragmatic approaches to pragmatic inference is that they try to account for inferential meanings on the basis of a restricted set of maxims or principles. The communication principles advocated by some pragmatist, with no doubt, reduce cognitive effort to acquire the intention, but fail to give a complete explanation towards the understanding process. Basically speaking, there are two inadequacies of pragmatics in explaining the process of pragmatic inference: the first is that it doesn't explain the fastness and automaticity in reasoning; the second is that it doesn't explore the conceptual essence of pragmatic inference. We propose that under many situations, this process of inference is accelerated by the metonymic relation that has pre-existed in the frame of cognitive domain. On the whole, the researchers from the perspective of cognitive linguistics can answer some of the questions which can't be solved from pragmatic approach, to some extent. The understanding of language needs inference, whereas inference cannot be separated from cognition. In the previous study on metonymy and pragmatic inference, the researchers didn't pay much attention to the pragmatic factors involving in the metonymic mapping. We argue that in the metonymic mapping process in pragmatic inference, there are pragmatic factors as cognitive background knowledge, immediate context and individual pragmatic factors functioning together. Thus we hypothesize the metonymic mechanism and propose the Cognitive-Pragmatic Metonymy-Inference Model to account for the process of pragmatic inference. Under this mechanism, we analyze metonymic operation in the explicature derivation and implicature derivation and discuss the metonymic operation on the level of reference and speech act.Through the analysis, we find that conceptual metonymies often provide ready-made pointers towards plausible inferential pathways in the interpretation of utterance. These pointers, which are normally automatic, contribute greatly to the ease and speed of interpretation. The cognitive factors and pragmatic factors work together during the process of pragmatic inference. This explains why the conversational participants usually draw the inference necessary to arrive at the intended interpretation without any noticeable effort and with lightning speed. And we still find that metonymy as a cognitive mechanism has a substantive status in the process of pragmatic inference and even in the way of human reasoning.