| Traditionally,metonymy has been regarded as a rhetorical device for language decoration.Originating with Aristotle,the classical research tradition has exerted immense influence on Chinese and western Rhetoric until the late 20th century.Since the 1980s,cognitive linguists have begun to show an increasing interest in metonymy,and started to regard it as a conceptualizing mode,which brought about a rapid development of its research.After the 1990s,pragmatics also started to pay attention to metonymy research,with a focus on the use and interpretation of referential metonymy,novel metonymy in particular.However,neither cognitive linguistics nor pragmatics has carried out adequate studies to explore the pragma-cognitive processes of metonymy interpretation.In recent years,some scholars started to lift the veil on metonymy interpretation from cognitive-pragmatic perspectives.However,these studies are purely theoretical descriptions and analyses of metonymy interpretation,failing to explain many details such as the constraints and triggering process of metonymy interpretation,the selective mechanism in case of competing candidate metonymic interpretations and the difficulty of processing different types of referential metonymies.Given these inadequacies,the current study aims to explore theoretically and experimentally the pragma-cognitive selective mechanisms pertaining to metonymy interpretation,the constraints triggering the metonymic interpretation and the processing difficulty of metonymy interpretation.This study redefines referential metonymy,taking the relation of context and conventionalization of meaning into account.The referential metonymies form a continuum,with the conventional and non-conventional(novel)metonymy at each end.The conventional referential metonymy has its meaning highly conventionalized,even entering the lexicon,with its interpretation barely relying on context;the non-conventional referential metonymy is what the communicator creatively uses in a certain context,with a highly flexible metonymic relation and its interpretation relies heavily on context.Between the conventional and non-conventional referential metonymy,there is an intermediate,half-conventinalized section,the degree of conventionalization of which is adjusted by context.In terms of research methodology,the study combines theoretical analyses with a psychological experiment.With regard to theoretical analyses,the study constructs a theoretical framework guiding natural language interpretation on the basis of the basic assumptions of Relevance Theory and Optimality Theory,and illustrates the model with referential metonymy.Using Chinese referential metonymy data,the study works out three types of constraint assumptions and their hierarchy,the processing order of metonymy and non-metonymy interpretations,and the selective mechanism of different candidate meanings.In terms of the experiment,the study adopts a think-aloud protocol and a supplementary interview to gather relevant data.The think-aloud protocol,by controlling factors such as constraint assumptions,the conventionalization of metonymic meanings and focusing on the research questions,compares metonymy interpretations with non-metonymy interpretations,explores how communicators choose competing meanings and finds out the order and difficulty of processing metonymic language.The follow-up interview,aimed at providing supplementary information,tries to elicit information concerning the acceptability of metonymy interpretations,the constraint assumptions triggering metonymy understanding and the order of processing metonymic meanings.The results of the experimental study show that:1)cognition,topic,register,semantics,punctuation marks and grammar constraint assumptions form the hierarchy of metonymy interpretation.The violation of grammar,punctuation marks,semantics and register constraint assumptions jointly trigger metonymy interpretation.The violation of punctuation marks,namely the use of quotation marks and book title marks,reminds the hearer to activate metonymic interpretation.Register is a new constraint assumption found in the think-aloud report.When the communicator finds a conflict of register between the target and other words,he will understand the target word in accordance with the register of the other words in the same sentence or larger context.Besides,the constraint assumptions of topic and cognition do exist and normally cannot be violated2)in terms of different metonymic types,the constraint assumptions triggering the metonymic meanings may vary,but the most accessible candidate interpretations are always those most conventionalized in a communicator's cognitive environment,i.e.,either literal meaning or conventional metonymic meaning.For the comprehension of the conventional referential metonymy,the constraint assumptions of cognition and semantics play an important role in selecting the target meaning.During the comprehension process,the most accessible candidate interpretation is the conventional metonymic or literal meaning,which is most familiar to the hearer.In contrast,for the comprehension of the non-conventional referential metonymy,the constraint assumptions of cognition,topic,register and semantics play a key role in selecting the target meaning.During the comprehension process,the first candidate interpretation is always the conventional metonymic or literal meaning.3)understanding the same metonymic words with varying degrees of conventionalization in meaning poses different degrees of difficulty.The conventional referential metonymy is relatively easy to understand.The novel metonymy involving very high processing difficulty will be given up.The non-conventional metonymy whose meaning is difficult to associate with the conventional meaning is often difficult to understand.The degree of difficulty reflected in the frequent mixture of linguistic and non-linguistic information and body language such as hand and head movement in think-aloud reports.The theoretical and practical implications of the current study can be sought in theory,subject matter,research methodology and practice.Theoretically,the study specifies the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure by building a RT-OT Comprehension Model for Referential Metonymy.As regards the research content,the study contributes to the pragma-cognitive research on the interpretation of referential metonymy by investigating the principles,constraints and process of metonymy understanding.Concerning the research methodology,this study adopts a think-aloud protocol and an interview to find out about the process of understanding metonymy,verify and modify the hypotheses of metonymy understanding.Finally,in terms of practical implications,the study will help improve the performance in metonymy resolution and annotation and contribute to question-answering system and machine translation.Future researchers have a lot to do including focusing on a certain type of metonymy,for example,the selection of form and meaning during the creation and interpretation of referential metonymy.All in all,following the intergration trend in metonymy research will produce more creative achievements. |
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