A Cognitive Mechanism Of Conceptual Referential Metonymy

The researches about nicknames are most about naming theory, name and culture,rhetoric effect, and contribution to characters. There are few researches regardingnicknames as a cognitive linguistic phenomenon or to study on it from the cognitiveperspective. This paper selects the view of cognitive linguistics to explain thenickname as a language phenomenon of the referential metonymy. Nicknames in ShuiHu Zhuan are taken as examples and they are interpreted from the view of categorytheory as to expound the understanding mechanism and the cognitive mechanism ofthem. Through the research, this paper tries to answer the following questions:1. Why the nicknames can replace the proper names as a kind of applications?2. How the nicknames highlight the particular features of somebody by replacingthe proper names?The family resemblance theory of “category theory” describes the items and thecore meaning to present that the family resemblances theory provides the possibility tothe nicknames.Prototype theory, by distinguishing the prototype and the non-prototype, illustratethat the prototype actually is the paradigm of a category. So it can highlight thecharacteristics of somebody, if the semantic concept of prototype is demonstrated bynon-prototype, which has very explicit common characteristic with prototype.In basic level item theory, When the subordinates are replaced by thesuperordinate members, the certain particular perspective of the nicknames isremarked, which is the salient feature of people. Thus, the highlighting of certainfeatures of people is caused.The results of this thesis rich the study of referential metonymy, and theapplication of category theory demonstrates more explanatory power for linguisticphenomenon and the capability as the framework.