Understanding Metonymy: A Cognitive Pragmatic Perspective

Metonymy is universal in natural languages. It has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The notion of metonymy has been vastly expanded in "mapping" accounts to include various linguistic phenomena by means of metonymic thinking. Currently the conceptual nature of metonymy has been widely agreed upon; however, little has been said about the pragmatic processes that regulate the on-line comprehension of novel metonymy. Metonymy, as a fundamental cognitive mechanism, brings about semantic as well as pragmatic phenomena. For the present purpose of this paper, it is better to construct metonymy more narrowly, thus novel metonymy is singled out at the lexical level for an in-depth study. The goal of this paper is to explain how novel metonymy is understood, that is, how the hearer captures the speaker's meaning when a word or other linguistic expression is used metonymically. The methodology adopted in this dissertation is introspection supported by language data.Through a critique of metonymy studies both at home and abroad, the author argues that metonymy is a variety of loose use, and that its cognitive and communicative roles can be effectively treated in a cognitive pragmatic framework. This analytic framework has been put forth upon the basis of the characteristics of metonymy. For one thing, metonymy is grounded in a more general human tendency, according to which an individual or object can be identified through its salient properties; for another, the reason for isolating these salient properties and using them as means of identifying the intended referent is given by the general tendency of our cognitive system seeking contexts to maximize relevance.As a "conceptual cue", metonymy has been a common concern in cognitive semantics and relevance theory. One similar view they hold is that the semantic representation underspecifies the communicative meaning of an utterance. With regard to the protean nature of word meaning, both approaches are concerned with describing the mental processes involved in meaning construction in which words serve as points of access to the large-scale of encyclopedic knowledge. Relevance theory has brought a rather different cognitive conception of pragmatics as a mental information-processing system. For every utterance to be used as processing inputs there will be a vast mental encyclopedia of accumulated knowledge competing for attention. Cognitive efficiency is thus a matter of selecting the most relevant piece of information available. Hence what relevance theory emphasizes is the general principle behind people's organization of encyclopedic information, which is geared toward the maximization of relevance so that it is stored in the way that helps their understanding in verbal communication.There is, however, a need for further elaboration of encyclopedic knowledge within the relevance-theoretic framework, that is, how people's knowledge of the world is structured to facilitate the interpretation of metonymy in verbal communication. Cognitive semantics makes an excellent complement here to relevance theory since it emphasizes the role of conceptual structure on the generation and comprehension of metonymy, and maintains that concepts in knowledge structure are connected to each other via a relational network. But one problem, which remains unsolved, is that not all potential contiguity relations turn out to be actual metonymy. Clearly, there is a different emphasis between relevance theory and cognitive semantics on the role of encyclopedic knowledge in meaning construction. Further study is needed to benefit advances in both relevance theory and cognitive semantics. Hence these two approaches are integrated to give a more powerful account of metonymy. In this study, the author strives to formulate a systematic explanation of novel metonymic uses of words in verbal communication, coping with three issues concerning the constraints on metonymy recognition, the comprehension heuristics of metonymy and the cognitive effects created by metonymy.To understand metonymy in verbal communication, people are first confronted with the question of what constrains the recognition of metonymy. Different parameters are examined in terms of syntactic deviations, selection restriction violations and the principles of relative salience; however, it is found that there are no necessary and sufficient linguistic or cognitive conditions for a word or phrase to be a metonymy. Through careful analysis of the data, this study points out that it is context that exerts the constraining impact on metonymy recognition. The recognition of metonymy depends on the creation of a context that encourages and guides the exploration of encyclopedic knowledge involved in the ad hoc concept construction. In the ostensive-inferential process, the speaker might convey his utterance in such a manner as to make the hearer process information that is mutually manifest. Thus, mutuality of assumptions serves as a prerequisite for metonymy recognition.Having found the constraining influence of context on metonymy, it is necessary to examine the cognitive process of pragmatically unpacking metonymy, i.e. how metonymy is understood when it is used in a specific context. Lexical pragmatics is confronted with a genuine challenge for metonymy interpretation. The problem is that the notion of concept broadening and narrowing is taken very seriously as inferential processes dealing with the relation of denotation between the ad hoc concept and the encoded concept. Accordingly, the author has tried to sketch a refined relevance-theoretic approach to metonymy, aiming to offer a way of solving the "transfers of meaning" issue based on people's inferential association. It is assumed that what is true of utterance interpretation should also be true of an utterance containing metonymic expressions. Metonymy interpretation is achieved in consistency with a particular expectation of relevance raised by the utterance itself. In constructing the ad hoc concept of a metonymic expression, a different inferential route is taken, which is not confined to the modification of literal meaning of metonymic expressions, but is extended to the identification of the most accessible metonymic relation, which is exploited in metonymic inference.In addition to the ad hoc concept and the basic explicature to which metonymic expressions contribute, it is necessary to explore the communicative effects the hearer will get from the use of metonymy. As cognitive semantics is mainly concerned with metonymic thinking, it says little about the functions of metonymy in use. In contrast, relevance theory has already advanced thinking about how context enables people to draw different cognitive effects in utterance interpretation. The present investigation has found that novel metonymy mainly has three pragmatic functions: highlighting of associative relations, strengthening of contextual effects and achievement of interpersonal effects. This study simply discusses the cognitive effects of metonymy based on the relevance-theoretic framework.It is suggested that an interdisciplinary perspective is advisable to take for a thorough study of metonymy in the broader pragmatic and cognitive respects. The author offers this dissertation in the hope of furthering this endeavor so as to expand the scope of the current lexical pragmatics to metonymic uses of words. Actually, this study leaves much to be improved and it is expected that further research will provide converging evidence for the conclusion of the present study.