A Study Of Narrative In Fiction From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metonymy

In modern narratology, narrative is defined as the representation of events. Narrative prevails in all kinds of media such as fiction, poetry, drama, prose, paintings, and gestures. Narrative is not a capacity unique to the writers; all ordinary people need to tell their 'stories' or the 'events' they experience for a successful communication. Narrative is also not the privilege of one specific nation or culture; it is a tool of communication shared by all human beings. Nowadays, with the development of narrative studies, people gradually recognize the importance of narrative. We recognize that narrative capacities follow us the day we were born into this world and narrative is a mode of thinking, a cognitive endowment. We can not live without narrative activities or narrative capacities.Narrative studies began in the ancient Greek times. Until now, scholars mainly approach narrative from the rhetorical, formalist, struturalist, social-cultural, cognitive perspectives. Within this thesis, the author prefers the cognitive approach to narrative, i.e., cognitive narratology, believing that cognitive approach can better reveal the construction and interpretation of narrative on the parts of the writer and reader respectively. The thesis studies narrative from the perspective of conceptual metonymy, which is one branch of cognitive linguistics. Our research will be confined to the study of narrative in fiction for the sake of easy manipulation of theories and materials. It does not mean to regard 'narrative in fiction' as a special kind of narrative, which is based on different ideas of construction and interpretation. In fact, the author believes that the ideas and results within this thesis apply to all forms of narratives.The development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics results in radical changes of people's ideas about metonymy. Metonymy is not just viewed as a kind of rhetorical device based on substitution. Now we recognize that metonymy is a mode of thinking which derives from our daily experience and helps organize our thought, language and action. Metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon and cognitive process in which the designated vehicle provides mental access to the target. As for the working of conceptual metonymy, scholars have put forward diverse models such as mapping. highlighting and reference-point phenomenon. Efforts will be made to synthesize these models and build a unified model from which we abstract the essential features of metonymic operations: salience (of vehicle) and accessibility. Moreover, this thesis will give a general view of the functions of conceptual metonymy, including reference, understanding, inference, meaning extension, communication, and text coherence, The following discussions will be built on the operating principles and functions of conceptual metonymy.Within this thesis, the author attempts to locate the interface between conceptual metonymy and narrative, which is partly built on the interpretation of current narrative theories from the perspective of conceptual metonymy. It is found that the working of conceptual metonymy is compatible with the narrative construction and interpretation in many aspects. This thesis is mainly intended for an exploration of the relationship between conceptual metonymy and the macro-structure of a narrative rather than a study of conceptual metonymy in specific linguistic points. Our focus is on the discovery of specific metonymic concepts underlying narrative construction and interpretation. In practice, our analysis will be conducted from two angles. One is about the major components of a narrative: events, characters and settings; the other is concerned with the writer and reader who participate in the construction and interpretation respectively. With regard to event representation, it is noted that the writer needs to select salient initial, central or final subevents to stand for the whole event, or select salient events to represent a story. The correlations between conceptual metonymy and characterization are mainly shown in indirect characterization and naming. The reader tends to infer the character-traits from the character's external appearance or the environment he lives in, because they bear a causal relationship with each other. Meanwhile, the process of naming a character often shows the writer's metonymic thought since he constantly selects the most salient property to represent the whole person. The writer's description of characters and settings is also metonymically-based since this process involves a selection of details, either body parts or locations, in order to represent the characters or settings as a whole. Moreover, the writer's interpretation of the narrative theme often involves a metonymic extension from one character to a group, social class or even the whole world.This thesis arrives at the conclusion that the writer and reader in the process of generating and interpreting narratives show their metonymic thoughts. To a great extent, narrative construction and interpretation are based on the workings of conceptual metonymy. The integration of conceptual metonymy with narrative studies boosts the studies of both narrative and conceptual metonymy by enhancing our understanding about them and broadening the research scopes.