A Study On Eponym In English With Its Reflection On Chinese: From Cultural And Cognitive Perspectives

Cognition is the foundation for language,and language is the window to cognition.All the language phenomena are the embodiments of cognitive ability and mechanism of human beings.Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary subject that concentrates on semantic issues.It has widened the range of linguistic research and deepened understandings of some traditional subjects in linguistics.Vocabulary is the basis of language and the most active element in language. Eponym is such a kind of vocabulary that is transformed from the proper noun (personal name,place name and trade name).These transformed words can be eponymous nouns,adjectives,adverbs and verbs.Eponym in language is an interesting phenomenon.The origins and formation of eponym have their own literary stories respectively,which are closely connected with the development of society.Eponym embodies rich cultural connotations.Therefore,it is significant to study eponym,although eponym holds only a small part of the vocabulary.This thesis is concerned with eponym,investigating their origins,forms and development from a cultural perspective,exploring the formation process of eponym on the basis of conceptual metonymy theory in cognitive linguistics and introducing their applications via a cognitive approach.During the process of collecting eponym,we find that the cultural elements such as literature,religion,scientific and technological progress,social economic development,politics,art and so on,play an important role in the origin and development of eponym,and they are the external impetuses for the development ofeponym.Conceptual metonymy in cognitive linguistics provides theoretical basis for the process of eponymy.The word "metonymy" which derives from old Greek means "change of a name" and "change of meaning".It is viewed as a way of rhetoric in which the name of one thing is used to stand for another in contiguity in traditional linguistics.That is to say metonymy is one of the methods to name things in the world.Lakoff and Johnson describe metonymy as a cognitive process for the first time in the book Metaphors We Live By.They believe that metonymy, like metaphor,is not only a figure of speech,but also a linguistic phenomenon, and more important,a common cognitive model.On this basis,cognitive linguists, such as Radden,K(o|¨)vecses and Langacker,consider metonymy as an important way of thinking and an essential means that human beings know about the objective world.Idealized cognitive model is an important notion in understanding metonymy. It not only stores information but also reconstructs the input information.So ICM plays an important role in the communication between human and the world. According to cognitive linguistics,metonymy is a mapping that occurs within the same domain-a single ICM.It is in nature a cognitive process in which one more salient aspect of an object,event or situation is used to refer to the object,idea,or event as a whole.On the basis of conceptual metonymy,this thesis tries to demonstrate that metonymy is the internal mechanism for the formation and development of eponym.And eponymy is a process involving the mechanisms of metonymic transfer of meaning,First,this thesis probes into the definitions of eponym.It proves that eponym develops synchronically with society and language.Second,it classifies the origins of eponym scientifically,which demonstrates that the cultural elements promote the development of eponym.Third,based on the conceptual metonymy, this thesis explores the internal mechanisms for the formation of eponym and introduces applications of eponym with different parts of speech towards a cognitive approach.After that,it presents derivatives,forms and current developing situation of eponym.Then,the worth mentioning thing is that this thesis attempts to present some common eponyms in Chinese and make a brief contrast with eponym in English. Eponym existing both in English and Chinese demonstrates that this phenomenon commonly exists in languages.However,it does need further studies in the future.To sum it up,this paper lays emphasis on the various sources of eponym,in which culture,as the external factor,promotes the formation and development of eponym.And metonymy is conceptual in nature.It is grounded in our everyday experience and structures our thoughts and actions.Therefore it is the internal mechanism for the formation and development of eponym.The process of eponymy is a metonymic transfer of meaning that is being rooted in the encyclopaedic knowledge of culture.Eponym is used as the source domain(linguistic vehicle) to indicate the unfamiliar,intangible and abstract things,which makes the readers' mind leap into another created space,so language will be more vivid and easier to grasp.