| Personal pronoun has always been one of the linguists' focuses. However, the following problem still can not get a satisfactory explanation:Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.(Halliday & Hasan 1976:2)Brown & Yule (1983:201) point out that them and six cooking apples do not form a co-reference because six cooking apples refers to those fresh ones while them refers to those "washed and cored" ones. However, people have no difficulty in understanding them. Then what causes the neglecting of such a change?Taking this as a starting point, this paper draws on Rosch's (1975) cognitive reference point theory, Lakoff's (1980, 1987) metonymy and metonymic model (My-M) theories, and Langacker's (1991, 1993, 2000) reference point construction theory, etc. and proposes the M-CRP framework in the hope of giving a better explanation of the personal pronoun use mentioned above. By M-CRP, this paper means that (1) M-CRP is a cognitive ability and a linguistic phenomenon as well; (2) M-CRP rules that in cognition, people usually choose a CRP (usually profiled, given, or prototypical within a category) through which a new entity is to be cognized; (3) the selection of a prototypical member within a category as a CRP is the result of people's daily habit of metonymic cognition; (4) metonymy and My-M have primarily a referential function. The defining of personal pronoun referent is also regulated by M-CRP mechanism and persona] pronoun usually refers to a profiled, given or prototypical antecedent.In such a framework, them in Halliday & Hasan's example can be better explained. Though them reflects only part of the features six cooking apples possess, it is quite natural for people to use them to refer to the six cooking apples because of their everyday habit of metonymic cognition. In this paper, such kind of personal pronoun use in a discourse context is termed as the metonymic use of personal pronoun.In order to further examine such kind of metonymic use of personal pronoun, this paper has collected the public speeches given by George W. Bush from the year of 2001 to that of 2004. Two concordance softwares—MonoConc32 and ConcApp—are employed to analyze these speeches and this paper finds that, in Bush's speeches:· personal pronouns (T) and their referents (R) can not be simply characterized by co-reference, or T laps over R; there is also a second situation—T and R overlaps partially with each other or metonymically related, that is to say that the metonymic use of personal pronoun is a common practice. Theoretically, there should be a third type—T and R have no overlaps at all. But the corpus displays no such cases;· every personal pronoun has a CRP and the CRP selected is usually the prototypical member within a category in a specific discourse context due to the operation of M-CRP. Consequently, personal pronoun assumes a grouping function. All the participants involved in a specific discourse context are distinguished by their roles marked by personal pronouns and regrouped. This grouping function is closely related to ICM, and therefore, has its significance in discourse analysis.From what have been found about the uses of personal pronouns in George W Bush's speeches, this paper believes that the metonymic use of personal pronoun will also make its presence in other discourse contexts. Therefore, this paper claims that it is far from enough to deal with co-reference alone, and this is where the significance of this paper's research lies. |
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