Associated Theory Of Metonymy Interpretation, Chinese Language

In this study, the primary goal is to reconsider the phenomena traditionally treated as cases of metonymy. The associationist account of metonymy is critically reviewed, and we suggest relevance theory to account for its production and comprehension. Since Chinese is our mother tongue, the data used in this paper are mainly mandarin metonymies, thus on the one hand we can attribute the theory of relevance into a wider cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective, and on the other hand, we can classify and comprehend the mandarin metonymy more systematically.Metonymy is widely defined as referential shorthand whose success is grounded on empirical associations among objects. Within the pragmatic literature, the first extensive studies of metonymy belong to Nunberg (1975) and Fauconnier (1985). Nunberg considers metonymy as a case of 'deferred references', in which a speaker uses a description of a and succeeds in referring to b. Fauconnier also sees metonymy as a sub case of deferred reference, which is enabled by the establishment of links between objects "for psychological, cultural, or locally pragmatic reasons"; these links are captured by pragmatic mappings which Fauconnier terms "connectors ". In his model, he proposes a general "Identification Principle" governs deferred reference. The idea behind their accounts of metonymy, that is, the existence of associations licensed by cultural or experiential factors, was taken up and developed by cognitive linguistics. They regard metonymy not as a linguistic object, but a conceptual or cognitive organization expressed by a linguistic object. The further inherent limitations of the above accounts are presented in this paper. We argue that this associationist view (underlying the traditional approach, the cognitive linguistics approach and the Gricean approach on metonymy) is in itself inadequate for a complete descriptive and explanatory account of metonymy from six aspects, such as, the conceptualization of metonymy, metonymic concepts, contextual issues, pragmatic criterion, referential uses of metonymy and the relationship between metaphor and metonymy.Sperber and Wilson (1995) propose two principles of relevance, namely,cognitive and communicative principle of relevance. The principles governinginferential communication have their source in some basic facts about human cognition: humans typically pay attention to the most relevant phenomena available, construct the most relevant possible representations of these phenomena, and process these representations in a context that maximize their relevance. In this paper, it is argued that relevance theory is better than the previous account in the comprehension of metonymy.We argue that metonymy is not restricted to its well-known referring function but is much more pervasive in ordinary language use. Three types of metonymy in mandarin are proposed, such as referential metonymy, predicational metonymy and illocutionary metonymy. We present that referential metonymy is a variety of interpretive use as defined within relevance theory. The general relevance-theoretic framework can effectively treat the cognitive and communicative role of metonymy. We offer a number of applications of this approach, which explain the on-line comprehension of mandarin metonymies, the variety of effects metonymic expressions can have, and prove that relevance theory is an efficient approach in accounting mandarin metonymy.Moreover, the relevance-theoretic treatment of metonymy is evaluated and it is demonstrated that it is better than previous accounts. Finally, the implication and effects of metonymic utterance are analyzed. The metonymic utterances and the together with the contextual assumptions yield a wide array of weak implicatures that could not be communicated by a literal paraphrase. Relevance-theoretic approach can naturally explain a number of effects caused by these metonymic expressions.