A Study Of Narratives In Oliver Twist From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metonymy

Modern narratology defines narrative as “representation of events”. Narratives exist in novel, poetry, prose, painting, drama, film, body language and other media commonly. As one of narrative types, novels are made up of words, which carry the artistic effects that the writer wants to express and are different from daily words. We need to find out the theoretical frame in order to understand novels better, that is, conceptual metonymy.The study of both narratology and metonymy originates in ancient Greece. Most scholars have paid their attention to the study on rhetoric, formalism, structuralism, social culture, and cognition of narrative, while, the thesis will study the narrative in fiction from the perspective of conceptual metonymy. Fictional narrative is not special but much easier to collect data and manipulate relevant theories. And the ideas and results within the thesis can be applied to all forms of narrative. In addition, instead of studying a whole piece of fiction, the thesis will apply conceptual metonymy to the relative narrative in fiction based on the basic components of narrative proposed by Abbot, that is, character, event, and setting.Metonymy was regarded as a trope of speech at the very beginning. With the development of cognitive linguistics, people find metonymy is not a conceptual phenomenon but also a mode of thinking and exists in people’s daily life commonly,organizing people’s words, thinking and action. The thesis tends to synthesize the models:idealized cognitive model, mapping, highlighting, and cognitive reference point and the four functions of conceptual metonymy including reference function, inference function,text coherence function, and communicative function.The thesis finds out that conceptual metonymy exists in fictional narratives and plays an important role in the development of stories. To some extent, conceptual metonymy is the basis of writers’ creating and readers’ understanding. Among a number of metonymic concepts, PART FOR WHOLE is the most basic pattern employed in fictional narrative.The integration of conceptual metonymy with narrative can broaden the study scope of the two fields and enhance our understanding for them.