On Indirect Anaphora From Perspective Of Conceptual Metonymy

Language is essentially metonymy. Metonymy is a kind of mental image. In our daily life, people speak and think metonymically. Metonymy can make people pay more attention to the highlight part of the referring objectives, conceptual metonymy has become an important way of thinking in the language of human behavior. Metonymy is a kind of reference phenomenon, which can be used to explain the indirect anaphora. Based on the framework of conceptual metonymy theory proposed by Radden and Kovecses and taking indirect anaphora as the research object, this paper made a classification of indirect anaphora from the cognitive perspective, analyzed and interpreted the dynamic mapping process between the antecedent and the anaphor in indirect anaphora and the cognitive process of the constructing of indirect anaphora, which is expected to demonstrate the feasibility of interpreting indirect anaphora under the framework of conceptual metonymy theory and to reveal the cognitive rules in behind indirect anaphora. According to the "metonymy producing relationships" proposed by Kovecses and Radden which hold that metonymy generation depends on two higher order conceptual structure:the overall ICM and other parts in the ICM; each part of the ICM, this paper will try to divide indirect anaphora into the radiation indirect anaphora, the presupposition indirect anaphora, the hyponymy indirect anaphora three categories and the contiguity indirect anaphora, the causality indirect anaphora and the foreground and background indirect anaphora three categories, and sum up the characteristics of each types; on the basis of the three cognitive features of salience, contiguity, and accessibility in the process of metonymy operation and the three cognitive basis of definite and indefinite, semantic relevance and pragmatic inference between the anaphor and the antecedent in the indirect anaphora, this paper analyzed the influential factors which will restrict the interpretation of indirect anaphora from the perspective of metonymy, proposed that under the two metonymy relations, in the same cognitive domain and in different cognitive domain of the idealized cognitive model, the meaning of indirect anaphora can be constructed by the three cognitive ways of semantic relevance, conceptual activation and schema inference.