| Metonymy is traditionally regarded as a figure of speech. Cognitive linguistics has been recently studying metonymy from a new perspective. Metonymy as one of the fundamental tools helps us to conceptualize the world and always exists in our daily life (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003: 3). The most important traditional metonymy theories include: the ICM of Lakoff (1987), Reference point theory of Langacker (1993), Psychological access theory of K?vecses & Radden (1999), which laid the solid foundation for metonymy development in other linguistic disciplines, among which illocutionary metonymy in indirect speech is the newly-presented high-level metonymy. In this case, Zou Chunling classified metonymy development as three phases: A FOR B, A IS B, and A IS KNOWN THROUGH B (Zou, 2010b: 36-40). The first is used in traditional rhetoric metonymy, such as'face'for'person'; the second is the model presented by Xu (2009: 2-8) to explain the vehicle appears at the position of the target, or vice versa, such as'Bush attacks Iraq'; and the third is used in inference, such as"万丈红尘即是我的七尺之棺", through"七尺之棺",we can know the meaning of"万丈红尘", thus the new cognition is created (Zou, 2010b: 36-40).With the conceptual nature of metonymy widely agreed upon, metonymy construal is deemed as inevitable especially in language usage. Recently, a fresh research perspective combining cognitive linguistics and pragmatics comes up, the core of which is to study the cognitive process in language use to achieve the aim of better understanding human cognitive capability and revealing the motivation guiding human communication. This is the major academic view hold by this paper. The author attempts to adopt'the inheritance of denotation and connotation'theory is presented by Xu (2009: 2-8) as the main theoretical framework and cognitive tool to perform further research concerning metonymy and language use. Furthermore, findings are made to widen the relevant knowledge about the study of metonymy.The objective of this study is to prove the feasibility of'the inheritance of denotation and connotation'on the basis of attribute model and further ascertain the application range of the inheritance of denotation and connotation in Chinese language phenomena. The methodology adopted in this dissertation is data-based analysis and interpretation, which is a basically qualitative one combining hypothesis-proving procedure. The so-called hypothesis can be expressed as the'inheritance of denotation and connotation'possesses strong capability of explaining pragmatic phenomena in terms of cognitive metonymy. The research layer of this article mainly focuses on the metonymy construal problem from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics that specifically studies the construal of the narrow-view metonymy, the construal of the referential metonymy and the construal of the illocutionary metonymy. Most of data are adopted from modern literary works, which ensures the reality of the linguistic analysis. Based on these typical linguistics analyzing and interpreting method and research procedure, this paper attempts to achieve the research purpose and tries to get some improvement. In brief, the conclusion of this paper is: if people can comprehend the cognitive process---how'the inheritance of denotation and connotation'helps to construct the interpretation of the communicator's meaning on the basis of attribute, they can know the intended meaning in the particular context when the speaker uses the expression of metonymy to show the intention. This dissertation is aimed at this objective. |
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