A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Metonymy From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In traditional rhetoric, metonymy is viewed as a figure of speech that involves a process of substituting the name of one thing for that of another with which it is closely associated in reality. It is thought of as a matter of language, especially literary language. In the last decades, with the advent of cognitive linguistics, it is generally believed by scholars that metonymy is more than a linguistic device; rather it is viewed as an important cognitive means, a reasoning and inferential process. Contemporary cognitive linguists generally think metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model (ICM).The shift of beliefs towards metonymy from rhetorical to cognitive perspective has broadened the scope of metonymy remarkably and people's understanding of metonymy has deepened significantly. However, the shift has not accounted the phenomenon thoroughly. The issues such as understanding system, pragmatic functions of metonymy and so on have not got their satisfactory answers. Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson offers new perspective to study metonymy.According to Relevance Theory, any communication is an ostensive-inferential one with intentions and purposes. The Principle of Relevance, which is the core of the Relevance Theory, holds that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. During the process of communication, communicator should save hearer's processing efforts as much as possible; extra effort of the hearer to understand the utterance must be offset by some increase in contextual effects.Taking Relevance Theory as its framework, the present study tries to explore and discuss the pragmatic functions of metonymy based on data analysis. Laoshe's famous play Teahouse was chosen as the data source in the study. The author first identified all the metonymic utterances in the play according to the cognitive definition and cognitive account of the nature of metonymy. And then each metonymic utterance was compared with non-metonymic and literal description of the same proposition in order to find out the unique communicative effects and pragmatic functions of metonymy. At last, the effects and functions were put into different subcategories and theoretical explanations were provided.Through a large amount of analysis of the metonymies in the play Teahouse, the present study found that the motivations and pragmatic functions of metonymy could be explained in the light of the Principle of Relevance: on the one hand, compared with literal and detailed descriptions, the use of metonymy makes the utterance and ostensive-inferential communication more economical, thus saving the processing efforts for the hearer; on the other hand, a large number of metonymies are indirect representations of communicator's thoughts. The indirectness of the metonymies demands more processing efforts from the hearer compared with literal descriptions of communicator's thoughts. But these extra efforts are offset by extra contextual effects, which is another pragmatic function of metonymic utterances.