Metonymy In English Political News Coverage

Metonymy, together with metaphor, is claimed to be the most widely used figure of speech. Unlike metaphor, which has been widely studied as an essential way of thinking in the past decades, metonymy has received far less attention, though it also plays an important role in human life and occurs frequently in language use.The paper begins with giving a brief survey on the traditional and rhetorical views of metonymy, and then points out that the traditional views restrict metonymy to the names of things, mere substitution of names, and real-world contiguity. On the above basis, the paper analyzes some modern cognitive ideas of metonymy, which has broadened our understanding of metonymy by delimiting the weaknesses of the traditional notions.Up to now, there is no much discussion about political discourse. Traditional political discourse analysis is mainly on how language can persuade and cheat the audience, and this is firstly a rhetorical matter. In English political news coverage, we can see the power of language. And cognitive linguistists are trying to say something about human beings through language.This paper analyzes the metonymies in Englsih political news coverage from a cognitive perspective. For this purpose, the author built a corpus from about 30,000-word news coverage. After a careful examination, this paper tries to find out the characteristics of metonymy used in English political news coverage, for example, which kind of metonymies is the most commonly seen. After this, the paper tries to find out the functions of metonymy in this particular style, aiming at finding out the connections between metonymy and politics.