Speech Act Metonymy In A Cognitive Perspective And Its Pragmatic Functions In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Metonymy is traditionally regarded as a figure of speech. Cognitive linguistics, which has been recently developed, examines metaphor and metonymy from a new perspective. It claims that metaphor and metonymy are both important ways of thinking, fundamental tools for human beings to conceptualize the world. In the past twenty years, metaphor has been widely studied as an essential way of thinking; metonymy, however, has received far less attention, though it also plays an important role in human life and occurs frequently in our languages.An object, a concept, or an event has many aspects. The most outstanding, easy-to-perceive and well-understood one, namely, the salient aspect is paid more attention to by people in the process of cognizing the world. The thesis holds that this cognition is also suitable for understanding language in speech act metonymy. As people usually use some salient aspect of something to refer to the WHOLE part, when metonymic language is being used. While when people understand metonymic language, the salient aspect will activate the WHOLE part. Based on the above understanding, the thesis points out that interpretation of speech act metonymy should be based on the commonly used metonymic. Such a meotnymic thinking mode and inferencing method helps improve the speed of using language and the vigor of understanding language, and thus can be used to explain some complicated questions that we often come across when using language or understanding speeches.With a cognitive point of view adopted, speech act metonymy is analyzed in this paper. This paper explores the cognitive mechanisms of speech act metonymy and the role speech act metonymy plays in speech acts, and then further analyzes its pragmatic functions within the framework of relevance theory, using speech act examples in A Dream of Red Mansions.A Dream of Red Mansions is a classical masterpiece and a bright pearl in Chinese literature. It has more than 400 successively entering an appearance-more characters than any other literature work. Its author, Cao Xue qin, made full use of his linguistic art successfully, and endowed every character with personalized language style according to their social status, the specific scene and the relationship among different people. The linguistic description vividly revealed the inner world of every character. The purposes of writing this thesis are for readers to better understand speech act metonymy from a cognitive point of view, to enjoy how Cao Xue qin detailedly portrayed all the characters with clear-cut personalities, while at the same time, to know about the pragmatic functions of speech act metonymy from the speech acts in A Dream of Red Mansions, such as the interpersonal function, the pragmatic inference function and rherotic function, and to get more aesthetic pleasures.