Cognitive Analysis Of Metonymy In English

This thesis tends to prove that language is not an autonomous system and various linguistic phenomena have their cognitive motivations through cognitive analysis of metonymy in English language. Language is the outcome of people's cognitive activity. Language structures and language rules are reflections of cognitive principles. This is the basic linguistic view of cognitive linguistics.The basic method employed by this thesis is the descriptive one. This kind of method does not interfere with the research object and just records what is observed. On the basis of some evidences, assumptions are put forward as the precondition of further investigation. Through analyzing various aspects of the research object, the conclusion is reached. From the epistemological perspective, the research activity of this thesis fits in the scientific recognizing process: from the concrete to the abstract, and returning to the concrete again.This thesis consists of five parts all together. Chapter 1 is the introduction. It presents the theoretical background, writing intention, methodology, data sources and overall structure of this thesis.Chapter 2 talks about the prior studies of metonymy from different perspectives. Rhetorists emphasize the rhetorical functions of metonymy in creating certain expressive effects, such as vividness and brevity. In rhetorists' eyes, metonymy is a skillful use of language and is formed by violating certain grammatical rules, so metonymy is treated as poetic language. Semantists mainly study the influence of metonymy on the changes of meaning so as to give some explanation to the violation of selection restriction in sentences. Pragmatists try to explain how metonymy gets understood in certain context. All these approaches make some explanations of metonymy from different aspects. Generally speaking, their researches on metonymy all involve the using feature of metonymy. But none of them touch the nature of metonymysince they do not explore the mechanism for the production of metonymy. This thesis will analyze metonymy from cognitive approach with the hope of finding the cognitive motivation of metonymy and making an explanation of the nature of metonymy.Chapter 3 focuses on the investigation of the cognitive motivation of metonymy. Traditionally, metonymy is defined as the substitution of names. But some instances of metonymy counter this view. Through analyzing the nature of language, we find that metonymy is to substitute one concept for another concept. This is the reflection of people's cognitive ability reference point ability (Langacker, 1999:171). Langacker states that people's attention can be directed from one entity to another entity. This process operates on the conceptual level as well. People have the cognitive ability of accessing one concept (target concept) via another concept (vehicle concept). This kind of reference point ability is fundamental and ubiquitous in people's moment-to-moment experience. Metonymy in language is the reflection of this way of cognition. The nature of metonymy is to use one concept to evoke another concept instead of using one name to substitute another name. For the most part, however, this kind of ability remains below the threshold of explicit attention.Why the concept of one entity can be used to evoke the conception of another entity without causing confusion? Psychological studies show that there are three factors influencing the successful occurrence of metonymy in language. The first factor is the holistic feature of people's ICMs (idealized cognitive models) in cognition. Psychological experiments show that people's perception of entities or organism possesses holistic feature. ICM is people's basic tool of recognizing the world. It is the cluster of people's mental representations of various experiences. The understanding of any semantic unit cannot be separated from relevant knowledge of a certain field. ICMs cover various kinds of knowledge. So elements of one ICM have fixed connections. This kind of connection is the "contigui...