A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To The Interpretation Of Metonymy In Mandarin Chinese

The paper begins by reviewing and comparing different studies on the interpretation of metonymy before focusing the intention on relevance theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson(1995).Throughout history,the interpretation of metonymy has gone through the changes from the classical view of figure of speech to the cognitive views.Amongst the cognitive views,two theories are to be analyzed: reference-point phenomena of Langacker(1999)and the idealized cognitive model of Lakoff(1987).The definition of metonymy is also rewritten due to the nature of the theoretical framework of this paper,as,up till now,there is no appropriate definition of metonymy that is based on the theory of relevance theory.The linguistic features and reclassification of metonymy in Chinese are then explored to lay the ground work for the investigation of metonymy in Chinese.The linguistic features are explored from 4 aspects,i.e.,phonetic,lexical,syntactic,social and cultural aspects.The features reveal why metonymies in mandarin Chinese differ from other languages across the world.The need for the reclassification comes from the features of them and also comes from the dissatisfaction of the existing and popular typologies.After the illustration of the theoretical framework of relevance theory,the findings are presented and discussed with data in dialogic form from daily life.The use of verbal communications as the data is the consideration of the fitness of the chosen theory and of the hope to help understand metonymy in mandarin Chinese.The methodology is a qualitative one as it is analyzed on the discussion of the linguistic data.