A Comparative Study Of Metonymy In Chinese And English Political Speeches

In the past twenty years, as a way of thinking, compared with metaphor,metonymy has not attracted enough attention of linguists. In fact, metonymy is morecommon than metaphor. It is also an important thinking way of human beings andplays an important role in people’s life and language communication. Metonymies aredeeply rooted in people’s experience, and constitute our daily thinking and behaviorway. A large number of metonymies used in language reflects people’s mode ofthinking and political language is no exception. More and more scholars begin tostudy metaphors used in political languages from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics. But hardly are there studies of metonymies used in political languagesfrom the perspective of cognitive linguistics.The present thesis attempts to select metonymies used in English and Chinesepolitical speeches as the objects to make the comparative study from cognitiveperspective by choosing a total of30political speeches as the samples in the study,among which fifteen are in Chinese, and fifteen in English. The specific researchquestions of the present thesis are:(1) What are the similarities and differences ofmetonymies between English and Chinese political speeches?(2) What’s thecognitive motivation for the similarities and differences? Both quantitative andqualitative methods are to be employed for the investigation of metonymy in theEnglish and Chinese political speeches. Qualitative judgments are initially necessaryto establish what will be counted as metonymy. Then they are employed to measurethe frequency of a kind of metonymy in the corpus. The first stage is to workmanually through the speeches to identify key words. The next stage is to search forthese words in the whole corpus to identify whether they can be classified asmetonymy based on the definition of metonymy given in the thesis. The third stage isto interpret and explain the metonymy. This study attempts to prove the applicabilityof conceptual metonymy theory in the interpretation of political speeches. And itspractical significance is that it both provides a wholly new cognitive angle (especially the metonymic angle) for the political language researches and affords implicationsfor metonymy translation in political speeches.Through the comparative analysis, metonymies used in English politicalspeeches are mainly thing-and-part metonymy, category-and-property metonymy,location metonymy, action metonymy, time-for-event metonymy. The majormetonymies used in Chinese political speeches are thing-and-part metonymy,category-and-member metonymy and location metonymy. There are more kinds ofmetonymies in English political speeches than in Chinese political speeches. What ismore, thing-and-part metonymy is most pervasive both in Chinese political speechesand English political speeches, but category-and-property metonymy is used inEnglish political speeches more than in Chinese political speeches. Through thecomparison of the metonymies in these data, the similarities and differences are listedwith the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis, and meanwhile, themotivations for the similarities and differences are also explored, including thecognitive principles and communicative principles, and also the physical, social andcultural experiences that influence our cognitive models will also be taken intoaccount.Based on the comparative analysis, this thesis has an attempt to get someenlightenment for the translation of metonymies used in English and Chinese politicalspeeches. For the similarities, an equivalent reproduction of the mapping process ofmetonymy from the source language to the target language is suggested. As for thedifferent metonymies with different culture loaded, translators can naturalize themapping process of metonymy from the source language. Owing to cultural default,when conceptual mappings process in the original metonymy can be neitherequivalently reproduced nor naturalized in the target language, translators can adoptliteral translation with annotation in order to help the target reader understand it.