Metaphtonymy In Chinese And English Expressions For Verbal Behavior

In cognitive linguistics, metaphor and metonymy are regarded as cognitive mechanisms pervasive in our everyday language. Some studies reveal the ubiquitous presence and role of metonymy and it offers the motivation for metaphor. In the last decade, the interaction between metaphor and metonymy has thus become the most salient focus in the research of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor and metonymy intertwine with each other in an extremely complicated way. Foreign cognitive linguists have put forward several interaction patterns which are compatible with one another and not exclusive. The present author intends to integrate and revise these patterns, and presumes to propose two new terms:situational metonymy within metaphor and body-part metonymy within metaphor.With the revised interaction pattern, the present paper dedicates to conducting a comparative study on the metaphtonymy in the Chinese and English expressions for verbal behavior to peep into the differences and similarities between Chinese and English in the conceptualization of verbal behavior. It may contribute significantly to our awareness and appreciation of the culture-specific and universal factors in the conceptualization of verbal behavior. The language data is composed of 132 Chinese items and 62 English expressions.By minute and systematic analyses, the present writer finds that in the conceptualization of verbal behavior Chinese and English differ in the overall distribution of interaction patterns, the features of three interaction patterns, the diversity and function of body-part terms, and the culture-specific conceptual metaphors. The Chinese expressions prefer to employ the body-part metonymy to expand or reduce one of the correspondences in either domain of metaphor, while the English data incline to metaphor with a metonymic basis or with a situational metonymy in it and to drawing on the physical scenarios; the English expressions enjoy a wider range of body-part terms and most of the body-part terms are mainly integrated into a broader scene, while for Chinese most of the body-part terms are directly related to an aspect of verbal behavior and thus most of the body-part terms are speech-related ones.On the other hand, Chinese and English share some conceptual metaphors like ARGUMENT IS WAR; SPEECH OR WORDS ARE MONEY; SPEAKING IS PLAYING MUSICAL INSTRUMENT. Besides, Chinese and English enjoy similarities in the body-part metonymy as well: the speech organ terms or the phonetics-related terms all stand for speech or speaking via metonymic process; and the rest body-part terms all refer to inner thoughts or self.The above arguments shed light on the differences and similarities between Chinese and English in the conceptualization of verbal behavior. And we have to claim that all the comparison and contrast are descriptive. Our study can by no means exhaust all the relevant language data, but the quantity of language data in the present paper is sufficient to demonstrate the subject matter properly.