Metaphor And Metonymy In Interaction:a Comparative Study Of"Gut" Expressions In English And Chinese

Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, metaphor and metonymy are both viewed as a way of thinking and semantic construction rather than only a matter of language. Many scholars claim that there is a fuzzy boundary between them. Thus they proposed various interactional patterns between metonymy and metaphor, in which metonymy is more fundamental than metaphor. The researches on metonymy and metaphor offer a wealth of theories to explain this linguistic phenomenon.In recent years, among the objects of the studies on metaphor and metonymy at home and abroad, human body-part terms have received great attention. Human is likely to cognize the world on the basis of body parts and organs as body seems to be the most familiar part to know and perceive. Thus human body is viewed as the most fundamental instrument for human cognition and people tend to use human body-part words to express their thoughts.Even though there are a number of researches on human body-part terms, most of them focus on the most familiar body parts like hands, eyes and so on. Viscera lexes except for "heart" are more complex but attract less attention. The metonymic and metaphoric processes of body-part expressions are also rarely schematically analyzed.In this paper, non-literal senses of "gut" in both Chinese and English are studied quantitatively and qualitatively with the assistance of corpora under the guidance of cognitive theories. The paper intends to explore the conceptual process of "gut" expressions and reveal the similarities and the differences of the uses of "gut" expressions motivated by universal bodily experience and cultural knowledge across the two languages, based on the frequency of non-literal senses of "gut" expressions in two corpora.The findings show that:firstly, non-literal uses of "gut" across two languages account for a substantial proportion of its corpus citations; secondly, the metonymic expressions of "gut" in both languages are more than metaphoric ones, and a number of non-literal meanings of "gut" are generated by conceptual interplay between metonymy and metaphor, falling into four categories, that is, a metonymic expansion of a metaphoric source, a metonymic expansion of a metaphoric target, the metonymic reduction of one of the correspondences of a metaphoric target, and a metonymic reduction of a metaphoric target; thirdly, the conceptual processes of N-V conversion of "gut" expressions involve metonymy, and the interaction model is a metonymic expansion of a metaphoric source; finally, universal bodily experience can motivate equivalent expressions across two languages, but certain cultural and linguistic reasons result in more different expressions of "gut".