A Study Of L2 Metonymy Processing

As cognitive linguistics makes headway, the study on metonymy is no longer restricted to the scope of rhetorical device. Metonymy can be perceived as both polysemy and figurative language. As regards the models of processing figurative language, five of them attract much attention. They are the standard pragmatic model, the direct access view, the underspecification view, the graded salience hypothesis, and the constraint-based satisfaction model.In light of the graded salience hypothesis, this study investigates the influence of readers’ familiarity with the metonyms and the effect of preceding contextual information on the time course of metonymy processing. It attempts to answer the following research questions:First, is there any difference between the processing of familiar metonymy and unfamiliar metonymy? Second, is there any distinction between understanding the literal interpretation of a metonym and its metonymic interpretation? Third, when the preceding context supporting the metonymic interpretation of a metonym, is there any difference between the processing of the literal sense and the metonymic sense? Fourth, how does the preceding context influence the processing of the metonymic sense of a metonym?Two eye-tracking experiments are performed by inviting 30 students majoring in English language as participants to read sentences containing both familiar and unfamiliar metonyms. Experiment 1 is designed to explore whether participants’ familiarity with metonymy influences its processing out of free context and whether the salient sense is accessed first. Experiment 2 tests whether the salient sense or senses are still accessed under the condition where preceding context supports the metonymic interpretation of a metonym.Results show that, firstly, English learners spend longer time processing unfamiliar metonyms than processing familiar ones. Secondly, the time course of processing the literal sense of a familiar metonym is the same as processing its metonymic sense. Thirdly, under a preceding context supporting the metonymic interpretation, the time course of processing metonymic sense of a metonym is longer than processing its literal sense. Finally, when processing the metonymic sense of a metonym with free context and with a preceding context supporting the metonymic interpretation respectively, the former one takes longer. To sum up, the processing of familiar metonyms by English learners can be accounted for by the graded salience hypothesis.