A Study On Phonetic Metaphor Of Person Name In The Records Of Officialdom Exposure In Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Phonetic metaphor is pervasive in Chinese because Chinese contains a large number of homonyms but few relative studies have focused on it,especially on homophonic person name which is another long-neglected universal language phenomenon.And previous studies mainly concentrated on allegorical sayings and advertisements in terms of rhetoric or pragmatics.This study aims to analyze the phonetic and semantic features of phonetic metaphor implied in homophonic person name and reveal the cognitive mechanism of phonetic metaphor of person name in perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory.Data needed in this study are collected from the novel the Records of Officialdom Exposure.This study collects 363 person names from which we retrieve 114 homophonic names as research data.Data analysis are conducted in perspective of family name,given name and full name,taking both vernacular Chinese and Wu dialect into consideration.After phonetic,semantic features and cognitive mechanism of homophonic person names are analyzed,we reach the following conclusions:On the one hand,in perspective of phonetic features,over half of the phonetic system in the source domain is identical to that of the corresponding syllable in the target domain either in perspective of vernacular Chinese or Wu dialect.Additionally,in both perspectives,the similarity in terms of consonant and vowel is crucial to the emergence of phonetic metaphor.And tone is the least influential factor.On the other hand,in perspective of semantic features,phonetic metaphors are generally nouns representing someone or something closely related to a specific character,verbs used to show the character's tendentious behavior style and compound words indicating the same fate suffered by different characters and so on.When connected with phonetic metaphor of person name in terms of Conceptual Blending Theory,the prototypical conceptual blending network is not pertinent for revealing the semantic cross-space mapping process of phonetic metaphor.In this case,the single four-space model is refined into four which contains several subcategories.