A Study Of English Generics Based On Conceptual Metonymy

Generics, of simple and concise forms, are always summarizing regularities,properties or characteristics of a class. Such sentences are widely used in our daily lifeand encyclopedic readings, and function as a part of people’s knowledge about the world.The main feature of generics is "exception-toleration". In other words, although they arewidely accepted, through logical reasoning process, a counterexample can be inferred.Even though generics never bear scrutiny as to the facts they state, people would notdoubt the truthfulness of them.As a special language phenomenon, generics have given rise to wide interests ofscholars in philosophy, logics linguistics, semantics, psychology and Linguistics since1970s. The tradition researches on generics are mainly focused on formal semantic andlogical truth conditions of generics. Till recent years, with the development of cognitivescience, some scholars have involved in studying generics’ cognitive mechanism from acognitive linguistics point of view and have made contributions to the explanations ofgenerics. However, few of the studies are based on large amount of nature language. Thisstudy takes conceptual metonymy of cognitive linguistics as the theoretical framework toanalyze English generics, especially their typical feature, the exception-toleration, based on the collected language data.The data, collected from all Text-As of New College English, Integrated Course1-4,and the examples of other related literature, classified according to Xu Shenghuan’s(2010) classification of generics, which can be divided into three types: law-like generics,temporary generics and implicit generics. After detailed analysis, it is found that differenttypes of generics distribute differently in different types of texts and the functions ofEnglish generics are to describe the members of a class, to define a class，to have a minorhyperbole effect and to function as basis for the forming of some rhetoric devices.Generics’ economy expression and incomplete statements are closely related tohuman’s innate capacity of generalizing from instance to type, or from subtype to type, andcommunicating economically with least efforts, which is similar to conceptual metonymy.After the qualitative analysis of the generics and its remarkable feature, this thesisconcludes that generics’ exception-toleration is the natural result of metonymicmechanisms and prototype effect of conceptual metonymy, and truth conditions should bejudged in terms of certain ICMs rather than the codependence between linguisticexpressions and reality of the social world. When explaining the existence of implicitgenerics, it concludes that as the result of generic thinking, a basic thinking mode asconceptual metonymy, implicit generics can be used so commonly and theexception-toleration can also be explained by this kind of thinking mode.It is proved that conceptual metonymy provides a new horizon for interpretinggenerics. This research demonstrates once again the superiority of cognitive linguistics andthe great explanation power of conceptual metonymy, and it expands the application of theconceptual metonymy. Since the study is based on the data collected from the collegeEnglish courses, so it also has some implications on college English learning.