A Study On Motivations Of Animal Names In Fang Yan From The Perspective Of Cognitive Metonymy

“Referential Theories” have been an issue of long-running debate and there are two representative opposite viewpoints respectively from the Theory of Descriptions by Russell and the Causal Theory of Reference by Kripke.The former lays an emphasis on motivation at the initial stage of naming while the latter focuses on historical inheritance and usage after naming.They adopt the standpoints of semantics and pragmatics respectively.Each of them has attempted to establish referentialism in naming,but both have distinct disadvantages.However,there is a new perspective provided by Cognitive Metonymy for the studies on naming,which brings reconciliation to the dispute between those two theories.It points out that they actually share the same mechanism of cognition,viz.the metonymy +PART FOR WHOLE+.It also reveals that in the process of naming,usually only one salient local feature is eventually pinned down into a name whereas the other local features are not.The color,size,shape,weight or other characteristic of an referent could act as the “PART” that is chosen to represent the “WHOLE” of itself.Fang Yan is an ancient Chinese lexicological book written by the philosopher Yang Xiong in the Western Han dynasty.Its linguistic materials include the standard language and the dialects used in different regions of the Han Empire at that time.There have been masses of relevant researches since it appeared.But as the literature review shows,they have hardly been concentrated on the system of animal names,which are mainly listed in Volume 8 and Volume 11 of the book.These ancient animal names are of great value to nounal studies or dialectological researches on the archaic Chinese language.And this thesis is devoted to exploring the motivations of the animal names in the book from the angle of Cognitive Metonymy.Ahead of the core part of this theis,it makes a classification of these words and demonstrates their distribution with the method of classified statistic.In conclusion,the major findings are as follows: 1)Totally,there are 182 animal names in Fang Yan.They involve 33 types of animals,which are 15 types of arthropods,9 types of birds,7 types of mammals,1 type of reptile and 1 type of amphibian.Marine animals are not recorded.2)In terms of morphemes,the majority of these names is monomorphemic while the rest has two morphemes.In terms of syllables,the percentage of disyllables is nearly three times that of monosyllables.Animal names that have more than two syllables or morphemes are not found in the book.3)Under the framework of Cognitive Metonymy,the core part of this thesis analyzes five types of naming motivations of those animal words.In the first type,sex is chosen as the salient “PART” to represent the whole animal,involving the names jia and ji.In the second type,body size is chosen as the salient “PART” to represent the wholeanimal,including the names lao,zhan,chi-huo and so on.In the third type,color or stripe is chosen as the salient “PART” to represent the whole animal,involving the names dai-sheng,zhi-mo,huang-niao and so on.In the fourth type,behavior is chosen as the salient “PART” to represent the whole animal,including the names dao-xuan,sang-fei,ru-er and so on.In the last type,habitat is chosen as the salient “PART” to represent the whole animal,involving the names chu-que,yi-yi,fei and so on.Thus,the sex,body size,color,stripe,behavior or habitat of an animal respectively acts as the sole salient local feature,which is chosen to stand for the whole animal and finally nailed down into its name.Meanwhile,other local features are omitted in the process of naming.Cognitive metonymic mechanism of “PART FOR WHOLE” plays an important role in naming those animals.Although it is impossible to include all the local features of an animal within one name only,more than one local feature could be analyzed at the perceptual level.And this accounts for a common linguistic phenomenon,in which one species of animal is called several different names.To some extent,the diversity in naming motivations is a reflection of the difference in the feature that people choose to emphasize.This study provides a cognitive perspective of metonymy for the motivations of the animal names in Fang Yan.On the one hand,it is an attempt to probe into the naming system of animals in Fang Yan.On the other hand,it's also contributive to the application of Cognitive Metonymy.