Cognitive And Pragmatic Analysis

With the development of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is not only regarded as a rhetorical device but also a basic mode of thinking and action. It is a cognitive process in which people employ the salient and important part to stand for the whole or part of the whole, or select the whole as a gestalt to represent one of its part. This paper deals with metonymy from the perspective of cognitive and pragmatic linguistics, and discusses the cognitive and pragmatic motivation of metonymy and its pragmatic functions. The author analyzes the cognitive models of metonymy by means of the Spreading Activation Model and Idealized Cognitive Models, and explicates that cognitive frame and salience are two key factors in determining metonymy generation. This paper also explores the function of metonymy in pragmatic inference by combining Searle's Speech Act Theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory.