Metonymic Operation In Bridging Reference

Bridging Reference is a special anaphora where a noun phrase (NP) or a referring expression can be anaphoric without being directly connected by conference to another NP or a referring expression in the discourse context. This implies that Bridging Reference is indirect in utterance and needs the hearer’s cognitive effort to infer the missing link. The review of the investigation on Bridging Reference reveals that previous studies are mainly from pragmatic aspect, discourse analysis and cognitive aspect to study the pragmatic function and explore the inference process of Bridging Reference.As a common cognitive model in daily life, metonymy is extensively used in communication. Furthermore, metonymy has the communicative function of referential pointing. However, the metonymic operation in referential inference of Bridging Reference lacks enough attention. Neo-cognitive pragmatics (Chen,2011) suggests that cognitive theories should be applied to understand utterances and deal with the problems in communication. Given all that, the present study aims to investigate the cognitive operation of metonymy in dealing with the referential inference in Bridging Reference from Neo-cognitive pragmatics, a new perspective. In other words, it is devoted to investigate metonymic operation in Bridging Reference.Inductive and reductive research methods as well as the graphical method are adopted in the present study to analyze the phenomenon of Metonymic Bridging Reference, where metonymy and Bridging Reference co-exist. Conceptual metonymy contains a source domain and a target domain, and these two subparts could be reflected into a certain relation, e.g., part-whole relation, cause-effect relation, and instrument-user relation. Similar to conceptual metonymy, Bridging Reference also contains two subparts:antecedent and anaphora (inferential reference). Besides, similar relations can be found in the subparts of metonymy and Bridging Reference. These similarities in structure and relation provide the accessibility in metonymic understanding of Bridging Reference.In addition, a comparative study on metonymy and Bridging Reference in structures and structure relations with case study and graphical interpretation reveals that subparts in metonymy and Bridging Reference are in a corresponding relation where the source domain corresponds to the anaphora, and the target domain corresponds to the antecedent.This paper also finds that the characteristics of metonymy influence the operability of metonymic operation in Bridging Reference. Relevance, activation and prominence are three workable mechanisms of metonymy.Lastly, metonymy is workable in the comprehension of utterances in communication due to its referent-point function, and this is capable to deal with the problems of misunderstandings in multi-language communication and foreign language learning and teaching.