An Analysis Of Differences Between Conceptual Metaphor And Conceptual Metonymy From The Cognitive Perspective

From the traditional view, metaphor and metonymy are seen as figures of speech that are widely used in our everyday life, especially in literary and imaginative works. But in recent years, metaphor and metonymy are not only regarded as rhetorical devices but also the most significant ways of thinking and the cognitive modes of experiencing the objective world. In the last twenty years, cognitive linguistics, based on experiential realism of the world, has examined metaphor and metonymy from a new perspective. It claims that metaphor and metonymy are important ways of thinking, fundamental tools for human beings to perceive and conceptualize the world.As the title suggests, the thesis aims to study metaphor and metonymy from the cognitive perspective. Metaphor and metonymy are prevalent in human languages. They structure our knowledge and influence our ways of thinking and acting. Conceptual metaphor considers similarity among different things as its psychological basis. Cognitive subjects make one conceptual domain map onto another by reasoning, which thus makes the utterances conceptual. The main function of conceptual metaphor is to describe things. By contrast, metonymy focuses on contiguity among different things. It usually occurs within the same conceptual domain or event domain (the same ICM). People can constitute the elements of conceptual domain for those of event domain or replace the elements of these two domains with one whole domain of the two. The main function of metonymy is to refer things. So we can see that both metaphor and metonymy are the most important ways of people’s thinking and the main modes for people to experience the objective world. Focused on people’s basic experiences, metaphor and metonymy are the ways of thinking and acting for people’s everyday lives. Metaphor and metonymy in languages are the creative abilities to think occurring with the development of people’s cognitions. They are viewed as the advanced stage of cognitive development and an indispensable cognitive ability for people to experience the world, especially in understanding abstract things. At the same time, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, as automatic and spontaneous processes are conceptual in nature.The thesis begins with the brief introduction of the research including research background, questions to be answered in the thesis and the purpose of the study. Then researches on metaphor and metonymy at home and abroad will be introduced briefly, which followed by the basic theoretical framework of the cognitive linguistics and the Grice’s Cooperative Principle used. The cognitive linguistics mainly includes three major linguistic views:the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view, and three major theories of cognitive linguistics: Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs), Gestalt theory and Prototype theory. From the above introduction about cognitive linguistics, we can have a better understanding of what a cognitive approach is. Then we will come to the introduction of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, their classifications and working mechanisms. The interaction of metaphor and metonymy will also be studied, because though metaphor and metonymy are two different cognitive processes, they also can work with each other and their interaction can not be overlooked. This part is the most important in this study, which is the core to be analyzed. And the aim of our study is to better understand the speaker’s implied meanings relating to Pragmatics that relies mostly on the context of the utterance, thus the same propositional utterances may have absolute different meanings. Therefore, metaphor and metonymy in the principle under Grice’s Cooperative Principle should be covered. The Cooperative Principle of Grice plays a crucial role in pragmatics, and its four maxims can measure whether the speaker tends to cooperate with the hearer, so that the hearer can clearly comprehend what the speaker’s meaning is and act accordingly. Metaphor and metonymy violate the maxim of quality of the four maxims, which should be studies further after realizing the principle of Grice’s theory.After the above discussions and analysis, we get a conclusion that metaphor and metonymy is not only figures of speech, but fundamental tools of thinking and acting for human beings. They can help us to understand the abstract and complicated things in terms of concrete and easy-to-perceive things. In addition, it is helpful for us to understand more complex English vocabulary.