A Study Of Lexical Cohesion From The Perspective Of Metonymy

Lexical cohesion refers to the linguistic phenomenon that some words which appear in the same text have certain relationship in meaning, including repetition, substitution and collocation (Hu Zhuanglin, 1994:112). Lexical cohesion is an important type of cohesive devices. Its conception first systematically appears in Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Since then, it has attracted the attention of many scholars. Some scholars try to develop the theory itself; and some others try to apply this theory into different fields, such as foreign language teaching, translation theory and practice, stylistics and so on. In recent years, with the development of cognitive linguistics, people offer a new perspective for the study of lexical cohesion.In cognitive linguistics, metaphor tends to occupy a prominent position and attracts the attention of researchers, while metonymy is taken to be less important. In recent years, people come to realize the importance of metonymy. Just like metaphor, metonymy is not only a linguistic device but also an inferential process. Metonymy is a special kind of mental mapping. People can speak and think metonymically. Metonymy allows us to focus more specifically on prominent aspects of what is being referred to, such as a person, an object or an event. Metonymic concepts are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Actually, metonymy is more original, namely, language is metonymic in nature (Radden & Kovecses, 1999). Metonymic thought has an important role in the production and comprehension of discourse. Now that metonymy is an important thinking mode of human beings based on the relations of contiguity and causality, we can turn to it for interpreting lexical cohesion in English texts. Actually, there are few scholars who have done researches on this topic except Al-Sharafi (2004) and Wei Zaijiang (2007).In this thesis, based on Al-Sharafi (2004) and Wei Zaijiang (2007) and other relevant researches, we try to explain lexical cohesion from the perspective of metonymy. This thesis is comprised of six parts. The first chapter introduces our research topic, significance, methodology and general organization. In the second chapter, as the literature review, we give an account of the research development of lexical cohesion both at home and abroad. In Chapter Three, which serves as the theoretical basis of our research, we first briefly introduce the development history of metonymy, then explain the textual basis of metonymic research. The fourth chapter is our major part, in which we try to explain lexical cohesion in the light of metonymy theories. Our discussion is unfolded in terms of the following aspects: general nouns, synonymy, superordinateness and hyponymy, part-whole relationships. It is proved by our research that the category-and-member metonymy and its metonymic relations by Radden and Kovecses (1999) can be used to explain the relations between general nouns; the textual model of metonymy by Al-Sharafi (2004) can be used to account for synonymy, superordinateness and hyponymy. Al-Sharafi's textual model and Lakoff's theory of ICM can be used to analyze part-whole relationships. Lexical cohesive devices are metonymic relations in nature. This opinion also testifies that metonymy is an important thinking mode. Chapter Five discusses the implications of our research for foreign language teaching. This study sheds light on the teaching of English reading, lexis, writing and listening. The last chapter, as the conclusion, summarizes the whole study, points out its limitations and the directions for future research.