A Cognitive Approach To Metonymy In Downton Abbey

Traditionally, metonymy has been regarded as a rhetorical device in which“one word is substituted for another on the basis of some material, causal, or conceptual relation”. With the development of cognitive linguistics, people realize that metonymy is not just a figure of speech. It is a conceptual phenomenon and a cognitive process. Based on idealized cognitive model and mapping theory, the present study chooses metonymies in English TV series Downton Abbey as the object and analyzes them from two aspects: cognitive understanding and cognitive effects.In the view of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity provides mental access to another conceptual entity within the same idealized cognitive model. Metonymy is conceptual in nature, and its cognitive basis lies in the conceptual contiguity and cognitive salience. The cognitive understanding process of metonymy is the mapping from the source domain to the target domain. The source domain and the target are within the same idealized cognitive model.Based on the idealized cognitive model and mapping theory, this thesis studies four types of metonymies in Downton Abbey from the perspective of cognitive understanding and cognitive effects. The four types of metonymies are separately referential metonymy, predicational metonymy, euphemism metonymy and event-schema metonymy. Referential metonymy has the main function of indirect reference and it is the most well-know metonymy among people.Predicational metonymy occurs in predicate. Potentiality for actuality is a noteworthy feature of it. Euphemism is fundamentally metonymic since the substitutional utterance and the unspoken taboos are in a kind of contiguityrelationship. Event-schema metonymy saves words but carries rich meanings,which makes the language more vivid and interesting.The purpose of the study is to help readers understand the metonymies in this TV series better, raise people’s awareness of using metonymy and improve their capability of inferring metonymies during their daily conversational communication, so the best cognitive effects can be achieved and the expected communicative purpose can be fulfilled during the conversation.