Cognitive Analysis Of Metonymy In Lyrics By Ou Yangxiu

The classical Chinese poetry is a splendid culture of our country. They present us the unique beauty of our traditional language. During the research, we find that metonymies are pervasive in the poetic works. Analyzing poetic works from the perspective of cognitive metonymy is a new researching area. The lyrics written by Ou Yangxiu play a vital and linking role in the development of our classical poetry. While the studies on Ou Yangxiu's lyrics are mainly on the literary level, including the content, writing style, feeling or imagery and seldom from the cognitive perspective. This essay attempts to study OuYangxiu's lyrics from the cognitive perspective. The most comprehensive and representative collections of Ou Yangxiu's lyrics is Tang Guizhang's Complete Collection of Song Ci Poetry including 231 lyrics. Based on these lyrics, the author makes an exhaustive exploration and analysis of the application and functions of metonymies in these lyrics which provide a new perspective for classical Chinese poetry study. The research achievements of this thesis are as follows: (i) Metonymies are pervasively used in lyrics by Ou Yangxiu. The author finds out 243 metonymies in Ou Yangxiu's lyrics. Nearly every lyric contains at least one metonymy. These metonymical words are mainly numerals, nouns, adjectives and verbs. Their applications are closely related to our culture and reflect our cognition of the world around us. (ii) The metonymy of that the resulted physical effect stands for feeling provides the physical experience for our perception of the poet's feeling. (iii) The economic characteristic of metonymy and its unique part and whole relationship can be effectively used to build the concise and refined poetic language and easier to be understood. (iv) Metonymic mapping can activate and extend the reader's imagination in understanding the poetic lines. The metonymic words in poetic lines are just the salient or easily perceived part or whole conceptual words but not all the information related, which leaves the readers with enough imagination room. (v) Metonymy operates by using the salient part to stand for the whole or the gestalt whole to stand for its part(s) which makes the readers in the process of understanding the meaning of a salient part at the same time can perceive the whole image meaning or vise versa. Therefore we can make a dynamic and more visualized understanding of the poetic images. In a word the study of this essay makes us recognize the pervasiveness of metonymy in our classical Chinese poetic works, understand the application and important functions of metonymy in poetic work analyzing and understanding, and at the same time provides a new perspective for our classical poetic work researching. Indubitably, the study has its limitations. For example, there are more metonymies and their functions waiting to be further explored...