A Metonymic Account Of Wang Zengqi's Novels

The study of metonymy starts in ancient Greek times. It is initially viewed as a rhetorical device that refers to the substitution of the name of something for the name of its neighboring thing associated with it. In recent years, with the development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, views on metonymy have greatly changed, which is marked by the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By in 1980. In this book, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the view of metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in everyday language and thought and helps to organize our language, thought and action. In other words, now metonymy is not just viewed as a kind of rhetorical device based on substitution but a mode of thinking which derives from our daily experience and helps organize our thought, language and action. It is a conceptual phenomenon and cognitive process in which the designated vehicle provides mental access to the target. With regard to the working of conceptual metonymy, several diverse models have been put forward, such as mapping, highlighting and reference-point phenomenon. Efforts will be made to synthesize these models and reach a unified model from which we abstract the essential features of metonymic operations:salience of vehicle and accessibility.Wang Zengqi is a famous contemporary writer. His novels seem natural and graceful. Many scholars are studying his writing style. By analyzing Wang Zengqi's individual works, Li Guotao makes a thorough and sophisticated analysis of the novel style. Xie Xiwen and Li Yongzhong focus on his language. Xi Jianbin points out that Wang Zengqi takes the perspective of childhood as a narrative strategy, in a bid to save the indulging past in the return of childhood. In addition, some scholars think that flat is not only Wang's narrative method and attitude but also his basic attitude to life and lives. Others maintain that the sense of style is reflected in three aspects: narrative innovation, focus on the creation of the atmosphere and stimulation of the reader's subjective consciousness. Yang Xuemin studies the novel blanks in Wang Zengqi's novels reaching the conclusion that narrative gaps in Wang's novels are formed on the basis of conceptual metonymy, best justifying metonymy's important role in Wang's narrative gap creation.In this paper, on the basis of the above studies, our focus is on the discovery of specific metonymic concepts underlying the fictional texts from the perspective of conceptual metonymy, which is one branch of cognitive linguistics. In practice, our analysis will be conducted from two main aspects. One is about the major manifestations of metonymy in Wang's novel gaps:inference metonymy, sequence metonymy and story metonymy. It is noted that most of the narrative gaps are created on the basis of metonymic concept PART FOR WHOLE. Meanwhile, the process of naming or describing a character often shows the writer's metonymic thought since he constantly selects the most salient property to represent the whole person. Studying novel texts from the perspective of conceptual metonymy also indicates that conceptual metonymy as a mode of thinking prevails in people's everyday life, especially in many writers' creation of literary works. This thesis indicates that analyzing the metonymic phenomenon of fictions with metonymic theories is to promote research into metonymy in other disciplines and enhance the practicality of metonymic study so as to further reveal the universality of metonymy and also broaden the scope of researches on conceptual metonymy.