Cohesive And Coherent Functions Of Metonymy At Textual Level

Metonymy, just as metaphor, is also a way to know the world through thoughts and accumulated experiences, which has been studying for years by scholars at home and abroad. Past studies on metonymy mainly focus on lexical and syntactical level, few researches can be found at textual level. That is, textual functions of metonymy and the role metonymy plays in facilitating cohesion and coherence need further investigation.Cohesion and coherence are two significant factors that contribute to the construction of a text. Textual coherence is a multi-level and multi-angle concept which demands that researchers should also devote their attention to cognitive level besides discourse level. Metonymy is a substitution process, during this process the whole part or hidden, not easily perceived part would be replaced with the sub-part or highlighted, easily-perceived part, which lay cognitive foundation for metonymy’s crucial role in textual coherence. Based upon Lakoffs Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) and the triangle model of metonymy proposed by Radden& KOvecses, together with Al-Sharaff s textual metonymy model, a tentative theoretical framework of the study is proposed to explore how cohesion and coherence are realized through metonymy in written text.Fortress Besieged, as a written text, is rich in metonymic expressions. By means of qualitative analysis, twenty-one sentences as well as three paragraphs are selected as the linguistic data to explore the cohesive and coherent functions of metonymy. The study shows that cohesive functions of metonymy are mainly realized through activating the same concept or concepts with relations of synonymy or inclusiveness within the same ICM, serving as the cohesive tie; while coherent functions of metonymy are mainly achieved via mutual activation and interaction between different ICMs based on metonymic relations of Part-Whole and Cause-Effect.With linguistic data from Fortress Besieged, this study is a bold attempt to explore how metonymy works at textual level and has certain value for future studies, both theoretically and practically.