A Study On Conceptual Metonymy In The Narratives Of Shui Huzhuan

The traditional narrative often focuses on narrator, reader and story, but ignorespsychological cognitive process of narrators and readers. Of course, fiction as apattern of narrative is composed of language, but if readers want to understand anovel better, language alone is far from enough. Hence a theoretical framework as abridge to connect the written words and the real world it refers to is needed. Thistheoretical framework is conceptual metonymy. In the process of constructing a novel,the author will choose the language and organize the text on the basis of his ownconceptual metonymy. During the process of understanding a novel, readers may usetheir own metonymy to understand what the writer means. So this makes the novelconsistent with the world it refers to, and connects the novel with the real world. It isknown that studying psychological cognitive process of writer and reader will help usunderstand narrative better from a macroscopic view.With the development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, people havechanged their view about metonymy. It is realized that, as a mode of thinking,metonymy can organize our thoughts, language and actions. From this perspective,metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon and cognitive process. During this process,people choose one vehicle to provide mental access to the target with the purpose ofachieving language economy.This thesis tries to use the working of conceptual metonymy by virtue of its twoessential features: the salience and accessibility to analyze narrative of the novel ShuiHuzhuan, with the purpose of exploring the roles of metonymy played in the novel’sconstruction and understanding. In this thesis the author attempts to answer thefollowing questions:1. What is the function of conceptual metonymy in the process of shaping acharacter in terms of metonymic naming and description of characters in Shui Huzhuan?2. What is the function of conceptual metonymy in the process of describingsettings in Shui Huzhan?3. What is the function of conceptual metonymy in the representation of events inShui Huzhan?This thesis provides a cognitive approach to novel analysis. The author focuseson metonymic description of characters, metonymic description of settings andmetonymic representation of events. The results show that:1. Metonymic naming and description of characters are conducive to highlightcharacteristics of the characters, which makes the readers understand the charactersand the theme of the novel easily.2. During the process of describing settings, the writer tends to choose the salientpart of a thing to represent the whole thing.3. The event-schema metonymy or script-like metonymy is often used inrepresentation of events.All in all, the integration of conceptual metonymy with narrative studies boostsboth narrative and conceptual metonymy studies and enhances our understandingabout these two fields.