A Study Of Metonymy And Its Translation In Shakespeare's Four Tragedies From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

aim to discover proper translation strategies for metonymic language.Metonymy is a kind of rhetorical device that is commonly used in literature works. Shakespeare fully utilized metonymy in his plays, bringing vivid characterization and fascinating plot development. Cognitive linguistics perceives metonymy as a basic cognitive model of human beings, which permeates human's daily life and language.On the basis of previous studies, this thesis, by using the metonymy expressions in Shakespeare's Four Great Tragedies as the corpus, studies metonymy in the perspective of rhetoric and cognitive linguistics. Through comparison and categorization, this article classifies metonymy into 7 categories by rhetoric and 3 categories by cognitive linguistics. A systematic study of metonymy is conducted in this thesis in the light of conceptual blending theory, exploring the understanding process and cognitive model of human's metonymic language. Conceptual blending is a dynamic and creative cognitive activity in which new relations and new structures are born through a series of projection, mapping and information reconstruction among four mental spaces, bringing about new meanings. After collecting and analyzing the metonymy expressions in Shakespeare's Four Great Tragedies, the author discovers that usually metonymy is not a rhetorical device completely independent of metaphor, but one that is in a close relationship with metaphor. They are interdependent and yet independent of each other. Finally, this article compares and studies the four Chinese versions of Shakespeare's Four Great Tragedies in the light of conceptual blending theory, and concludes 6 strategies for metonymy translation, in an...