On Interfacial Relations Between Cognitive Metaphor And Metonymy Based On Mathematical Modeling

The studies and researches on cognitive linguistics have been conducted in an unbalanced way since the founding of this theory. The research of this thesis is inspired by and based on such a background.The objective of this research is the interfacial relations between metaphor and metonymy and the research purpose focuses on the further discussion of two related core issues: 1) which one is more basic of the two fundamental ways of human cognition. 2)What about the relations of continuum and interaction between the two?The most prominent character of methodology lies in a combination of natural science and spirit and cognitive linguistics. Specifically, three methods were employed: 1)The mathematical modeling method; 2)Observation experiment; 3.)Exemplification by means of multilingual corpus.The main results include: 1) The previous academic viewpoint that “metonymy is more fundamental than metaphor” is proposed and supported from a new point of view. 2) From the perspective of mathematical and logical thinking, the paper establishes the function model of metaphor and metonymy and proposes the linear direction of conceptual metonymy cognition and curved synthesis of conceptual metaphor cognition. 3)A new standard for a distinction between metaphor and metonymy has been proposed from the view of sense generation. 4)The paper re-divides the existing classification of metonymy and puts forward the classification method of equivalence metonymy. 5)Multilingual corpus has proved that metonymy plays a decisive role in the process of human’s basic concept cognition. 6)The observation of experiment indicates that the natural birth of metonymy cognition is earlier than that of conceptual metaphor in the stage when children’s language ability has yet to be formed or was extremely limited and that three core ideas of philosophy are highlighted in the cognition process of children’s conceptual metonymy. 7)From the perspective of the philosophy of language,the relationship among metonymy, metaphor and meaning are examined and the continuum relationship between metaphor and metonymy are proposed.The innovation point of the study lies in the following aspects: Firstly, the theoretical innovation. The paper puts forward a new point of view after confirming and supporting the previous views by means of gaining evidence from the interdisciplinary field, multi-angle analysis, and new horizon. Secondly, innovation in methodology. Different from the previous study, the paper makes use of a combination of methodology between natural science and spirit and cognitive linguistics.The limitation of this study lies in: 1)The research is theoretical and involves knowledge of linguistics, mathematics and philosophy, which demands for excellent theoretical attainment in these three fields. Due to the limited knowledge of the author, the research might be influenced and confined to a certain point. 2)The theory and instances in the research fail to be integrated very well and the theory is not established systemically; besides, the objectivity and scientificity of the viewpoints, the corpus and the experiment in the study still require the validation of evidences and time. 3) The study focus on qualitative analysis, lack of quantitative analysis which uses a large corpus; meanwhile, the objectivity and scientificity of observation experiment is also to be improved. 4) The research is a little idealized and single-mode. 5)The application of the theory to practice in the study needs further exploration.To make this study deeper and more comprehensive, it can be improved from the following aspects: 1)The researcher should continue improving the theoretical attainment, especially the knowledge of interdisciplinary; 2)It is necessary to turn to the path of multi-modality from the single modality; 3)The study of metaphor, metonymy and rules of cognition should be based on a large corpus; 4)The study can go deeper in the features of metonymy use, especially for children’s cognition, the roles of metonymy in language acquisition and methods to stimulate foreign language learning by the application of metonymic thinking, and the influence of metonymy linear direction on translation.