Metaphtonymic Approach To "Hand/Shou" In English And Chinese: A Cognitive Perspective

In cognitive linguistics, metaphor and metonymy have been considered as twobasic cognitive tools pervasive in our daily life. Their working mechanism enables usto understand abstract concept in terms of concrete one, thus completes the cognitiveprocess of conceptualization. Metaphor involves a cross-domain mapping from thesource to the target based on the similarity of the two concepts, while metonymyinvolves a mapping within a single domain or domain matrix with the contiguity as itsfoundation. Different as they are, metaphor and metonymy often mingle with eachother and their demarcation is not clear-cut. With regard to the interaction betweenthem, some scholars abroad put forward their models. For example, Goossens’(1990)metaphtonymy, Barcelona’s metonymy-based metaphor, Mendoza’s Model ofInteraction between Metaphor and Metonymy, Geeraerts’ Prismatic Model and so on.Experientialism maintains that people’s conceptualization and construal of theworld is grounded on their daily experience and their surrounding environment. Hand,as an important human organ, offers an exceptional viewpoint for people to perceivethe world. The existing case studies on body term “hand/shou” are mainly from themetaphoric and metonymic angles respectively. The researches on combination of thetwo cognitive tools are rarely applied to the case studies on body term. The presentstudy makes a tentative attempt to analyze the body term “hand” within theframework of the interaction between metaphor and metonymy.In this study, we collected the expressions containing “hand/shou” from theBritish National Corpus and Peking University Sino Linguistic Study Database andsome other dictionaries. Based on the theories of cognitive linguistics and thecollected data, we made an exhaustive study and a systematic analysis of “hand/shou”metaphor,“hand/shou” metonymy in both English and Chinese. Then we conducted acontrastive study in order to find out the similarities and differences as well as theirunderlying reasons. We paid special attention to Goossens’ metaphtonymy andMendoza’s model of interaction between metaphor and metonymy. By analyzing themetaphtonymy phenomena of body term “hand”, the author hopes to shed light on thefuture research in this field, though there are many unavoidable limitations on thepresent research.The major findings of the present study are the followings:(1) Hand metaphor, metonymy and metaphtonymy are abundant in our daily language, both in Chineseand in English.(2) The similarities of hand metaphor and metonymy in Chinese andEnglish outweigh the differences due to the cognitive universality. The differences arerooted in their distinctive cultural model.(3) Metonymy plays a fundamental role inthe interaction of metaphor and metonymy, and it is a more basic cognitive tool inshaping our thoughts mode and in the process of conceptualization...