A Cognitive Comparison Of Metaphor And Metonymy

Metaphor and metonymy are traditionally viewed as the most widely used figures of speech. They each were basically thought of as a matter of language, especially literary or figurative language. In the last decades, with the development of cognitive linguistics, it is generally believed that metaphor and metonymy are more than linguistic phenomena, rather they are seen as reasoning and inferential processes. Contemporary cognitive linguists generally view both metaphor and metonymy as fundamental to the structuring of our conceptual knowledge.As the title suggests, this thesis is intended to study metaphor and metonymy from the perspective of cognition. Metaphor and metonymy are prevalent in human languages. They structure our knowledge and influence our thinking. The paper begins by giving a brief survey on the traditional views of metaphor and metonymy. Three major traditional views of metaphor are introduced. That is, the Comparison View, the Substitution View and the Interaction View. To the traditional view of metonymy, there are at least three common features. That is, they are all restricted to names of things, involve a process of substituting one noun for another and they arise between words already related to each other. From cognitive point of View, metaphor is the cognitive mechanism whereby one experiential domain is partially 'mapped', i.e. projected onto a different experiential domain, so that the second domain is partially understood in terms of the first one. Metonymy is a conceptual projection whereby one experiential domain is partially understood in terms of another experiential domain included in the same common experiential domain.Chapter two is mainly about the nature of metaphor and metonymy. Working mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy are different. Metaphor is the (partial) mapping of two concepts belonging to different knowledge domains onto each other. As a result of this linking, one concept (the target) is structured (understood) in terms of the other (the source). Metonymy is a conceptual projection whereby one experiential domain is partially understood in terms of another experiential domain included in the same common experiential domain. Metonymy is a reference point...