A Cognitive Approach To Metonymy In Language

Metonymy is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech that involves a process of substituting one linguistic expression for another. It was basically thought of as a matter of language, especially literary or figurative language. This view is reflected in standard definitions, which tend to describe metonymy as "a figure of speech that consists in using the name of one thing for that of something else with which it is associated". In the last decades, with the advent of cognitive linguistics, it is generally believed that metonymy as well as metaphor is more than a linguistic device; rather it is seen as a reasoning and inferential process. Contemporary cognitive linguists generally view both metaphor and metonymy as fundamental to the structuring of our conceptual knowledge.As the title suggests, this dissertation is intended to study metonymy from the perspective of cognition. Metonymy and thought are closely related to each other, which has been accepted by almost all cognitive linguists. In a broad sense, metonymy is prevalent in human language, it structures our knowledge, influences our thinking. Chapter three is mainly about the relation between metaphor and metonymy, the basic characters of metonymic thinking. After surveying some representative definitions, we have formulated our own working definition which in our opinion is more elaborated. Activation, which plays an irreplaceable part in the mechanism of metonymy, has been attached great importance. Apart from this, a few typical mechanisms such as Langacker's reference point and active zone metonymy, perspective salience and category extension have been commented on.Without doubt, the operational mechanisms should include other aspects, such as social, cultural and rhetorical. We have surveyed the previous accounts of metonymy contributed by structuralism and pragmatics in chapter 2. As for the pragmatic functions of metonymy, we purposefully leave them to chapter six together with the relations between metonymy and pragmatic inference.Current cognitive linguists generally claim that metonymy is more than a mere rhetoric device, rather it is regarded as a conceptual phenomenon and a cognitiveprocess which operates within an idealized cognitive model.The notion of "contiguity" is at the core of most definitions of metonymy. Traditional approaches locate contiguity relationships in the world of reality, whereas cognitive approaches locate them at the conceptual level. Lakoff (1987) accounts for metonymic contiguity within the framework of idealized cognitive models (ICMs), Croft (1993) deals with contiguity relations in terms of encyclopedic knowledge representing within a domain or domain matrix. Blank (1999) and Panther and Thornburg (1999) describe the network of conceptual contiguity by using the notion of frame and scenario, respectively. We believe that ICM can capture metonymic processes best. This is the reason why we put ICM and metonymy into the cental focus hi chapter four. We call conceptual relationships within an ICM which give rise to metonymy "metonymy-producing relationships". ICMs which include metonymy-generating relationships are mainly subsumed under two high-level conceptual configurations: (i) whole ICM and its parts and (ii) parts of an ICM. The whole-part configuration produces metonymies involving things, while the part-part configuration primarily applies to metonymies involving predications in events and states. We strongly believe that ICM plays a significant part in the generation and understanding of metonymy.Since classification of metonymies is connected to the desire to understand the exact nature of metonymy, we have compared some of the influential taxonomies and put forward a simple and schematic classification: low-level metonymies and high-level metonymies. We believe that high-level metonymies play an important role in grammatical structure, which we discuss in chapter five.It is not until very recently that people begin to realize the impact of metonymy on linguistic structure. So far, to the best of...