On Cohesive Function Of Conceptual Metonymy

It is generally believed that metonymy as well as metaphor is more than a linguistic device; rather it is seen as a reasoning and inferential process. Metonymic concepts are part of the ordinary, everyday way think, act and talk. Metonymic thinking plays a central role in the interpretation and generation of discourse. Recently almost all researches on metonymy agree that metonymy is conceptual in nature. It is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity provides mental access to another conceptual entity. Based on its conceptual nature, it is capable of providing a complete theory of discourse cohesion.Cohesion is normally defined as the use of lexical and grammatical devices to guarantee text integrity. It plays a very important part in linguistic research field, especially in discourse research. Many linguists and scholars including Halliday & Hasan have pushed forward the studies in this domain. How to master the essence of cohesive devices and how to put them into full use in linguistic research, still, is one of the essential tasks nowadays. Among them, it can be asserted that the most prominent contribution is made by Halliday & Hasan who divide cohesion devices into grammatical cohesion (repetition, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction) and lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation) clearly in Cohesion in English, and also they made an overall elaboration on the status of cohesion in linguistics for the first time. However, few linguists attempt to analyze cohesive power from metonymy approach. As an essential component of cognitive linguistics, metonymy opens up a broader prospect for studying the development of meaning construction at various levels, including discourse cohesion.In this thesis, based on the framework of metonymic theories by Radden and Kovecses and other cognitive linguistics, the author tries to analyze the cohesive function from metonymic approach.