A Cognitive Perspective Of Metonymy And Strategies For Its Translation

Metonymy is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech that involves the process of substituting one linguistic expression for another. It was basically thought of as a matter of literary or figurative language. This view of metonymy is well reflected in the definitions given to metonymy in rhetoric textbooks, literature and classic dictionaries, which describe metonymy as "a figure of speech that consists in using the name of one thing for that of something else with which it is associated."In linguistics, there exist two contrastive views about metonymy. Structural linguistics and generative transformational grammar see metonymy as a variant of language and often exclude it from their attention of study. However, meaning-centered cognitive linguistics, developed in the late 1980s on the basis of a philosophy of language and a view of language different from that of structural linguistics and generative transformational grammar, understands metonymy in a different way, maintaining that metonymy is not a variant of language, but a common language phenomenon, and that metonymy is not only a particular figure of speech as held in rhetoric and literature, but also an important cognitive instrument of human beings. Moreover, cognitive linguistics holds that the construction of metonymy is mentally motivated: It is a cognitive process that originates from the image schema of bodily experience, and in its construction the principles of proximity and prominence are observed. Metonymy is the result of conceptual mapping in the same experiential domain rather than the substitution of one linguistic expression for another.In the light of the views about metonymy held by rhetoric, literature, structural linguistics and generative transformational grammar, studies of translation of metonymy have predominantly focused on rhetoric dimension of metonymy while little attention is paid to its cognitive nature. Seen from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, which regards the construction of metonymy as cognitive process, traditional studies of translation of metonymy fail to recognize the cognitive nature of metonymy. This research, hence, is designed to study translation of translation from a...