Metonymy And Discourse Coherence

In discourse analysis, new ideas and thoughts have been emerging in an endless stream. The ones that most catch our eyes are the theories of cohesion and coherence. After the publication of Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English in 1976, the notion of cohesion was widely welcomed and accepted as a well-defined and useful category for the analysis of text behind the sentence, while coherence was regarded or even dismissed as a vague, fuzzy, and rather mystical notion. Coherence, as a significant and mostly used term in discourse analysis, is still not fully elaborated in its connotation and extension. However, the past two decades has seen a considerable shift in orientation, and, in particular, a fundamental rethinking of the concept of coherence. Linguists have explored coherence from different perspectives such as semantics, pragmatics, psychology and even cognitive linguistic, and correspondingly various theories of coherence were constructed. However, few took the approach of metonymy. 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 coherence.In the last decades, with the advent of cognitive linguistics, 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 we think and act as well as talk (Lakoff and Johnson 1983:38). The action scenario of speech acts, put forward by Thornburg and Panther from the perspective of cognition, provides a good rationale for the cognitive function of metonymy. This paper will deal with the important role of metonymy in the generation and interpretation of discourse. The author of this paper is going to try to analyze the explanatory power of metonymy on discourse coherence from these viewpoints. The thesis contains five chapters as follows:In Chapter One, the author answers the questions as what is the study topic in this paper, and why the author chooses this topic and how to conduct the attempting study.Chapter Two is a comprehensive survey of researches upon coherence. The author contributes some room in this part to the clarification and classification of some basic terms. The author distinguishes between text and discourse, cohesion and coherence, and various categories of and different approaches to discourse coherence. And through the analysis in this part, the study perspective is proposed in the thesis. Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main parts of the study. The author looks at metonymy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in Chapter Three and has formulated a working definition which is more elaborated after surveying some representative definitions. Activation, which plays an irreplaceable part in the mechanism of metonymy, has been attached great importance to. Apart from this, a few typical mechanisms such as Langacker's reference point and active zone metonymy, and perspective salience have been commented. The discussion of metonymy here puts great importance not only on the theory itself but also on the interpretation of discourse coherence in the thesis.The action scenario of speech acts, put forward by Thornburg and Panther from the perspective of cognition, provides a good ration for the cognitive function of metonymy. In the discourse, one word can only activate one element of the action scenario of speech acts. But it is this element that has a structural relationship with others and the whole action scenario, which makes it have the substituting function. All this will be presented in Chapter Four.Chapter Five, the concluding part of the thesis, summarizes the findings and points out the limitations of the research and directions for future study.