On Textual Cohesive And Coherent Functions From The Perspective Of Cognitive Metonymy

As a traditional language phenomenon, metonymy has been regarded as a figure of speech for a long time. In 1980, Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson was published, and then the cognitive function of metaphor and metonymy has drawn the attention of researchers in different fields. In traditional rhetoric, metonymy is the process in which one word can be substituted by another word. In recent years, the study of metonymy has been expanded to the field of cognitive linguistics. With its definition in a much broader sense, metonymy is not merely seen as word substitution but the substitution of concepts as well. The major issues of metonymy studies gradually shift from the lexical level to textual level. It is necessary to explore whether there is an underlying metonymic mechanism behind cohesion and coherence, and how metonymy functions in cohesion and coherence.Based on Al-Sharafi’s textual metonymy theory and theories about cohesion and coherence in systemic functional linguistics, this thesis explores the cohesive and coherent functions of cognitive metonymy in The Peony Pavilion, with a methodology of qualitative research method.Research findings are as follows:1) From the textual metonymy perspective, metonymy is closely related to cohesion and coherence. Cohesion can be viewed as the formal connectedness and coherence as the cognitive connectedness of texts.2) Textual metonymy can effectively account for cohesive devices including reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion in the text of The Peony Pavilion. Metonymic relations of FORM FOR FORM, FORM FOR THING, THING FOR FORM, CONCEPT FOR FORM and FORM FOR CONCEPT are applied to build formal connectedness.3) Textual metonymy is of strong explanatory power for text coherence. In The Peony Pavilion, coherence is achieved by metonymically activating cognitive structures of schema, script, scenario and metonymic inference.By probing into the study of textual metonymy, the thesis not only expands the research area of metonymy, but also proves that textual metonymy theory can offer convincing interpretation for textual cohesion and coherence. Beyond that, with the classic opera text The Peony Pavilion as corpus, the study is conducive to the multidimensional appreciation of Chinese traditional literature.