A Cognitive Research On Metonymy

Metonymy, like metaphor, is traditionally regarded as a figure of speech with its theories restricted in the field of rhetoric since Aristotle. It is viewed as a process of substituting one linguistic expression for another, or a relation in which one linguistic expression "stands for" another. Over the last two decades, the modern cognitive linguists have made a lot of researches on metaphor and metonymy and considered metonymy as a cognitive tool like metaphor. But compared with metaphor, metonymy has received much less attention though it is widely used in human language and plays an important role in human thinking. Moreover, the cognitive power of metonymy, understanding of metonymy and the applications of metonymy need a further study.Giving a brief survey on traditional and cognitive views of metonymy, this paper claims the cognitive views broaden our understanding of metonymy by delimiting the weakness of the traditional definitions and refining its classification. The cognitive view provides a better way to understand the nature of metonymy and holds that metonymy should be interpreted as conceptual in nature. Metonymy, no less significant than metaphor, is pervasive in our language. What underlies this phenomenon is that people always employ a salient, well-understood or easily-perceived aspect to stand for the whole or another aspect of the whole, or to select the whole as a gestalt to represent one of its parts, thus metonymy provides better understanding.As a cognitive tool, the strong power of metonymy lies in its cognitive functions. Metonymy allows people to apply one salient, concrete aspect of something to get access to another less salient or abstract aspect of that thing; therefore it is an efficient tool for people to conceptualize the abstract world. When perceiving the world, people recognize persons, events or ideas from a certain perspective, and make judgments or form a certain attitude or perform some actions on the basis...