Cognitive Metonymy In Discourse Cohesion And Coherence

Cohesion and coherence across the discourse are significant features of discourse organization. Cohesion is the visible cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion in the surface structure of a discourse whereas coherence is the deep cohesion which establishes coherent relationships through context such as speech act, relevance and schema. With discourse analysis becoming more and more popular, in recent years, some linguists shift the emphasis to the study of cohesion and coherence from the perspective of cognition.A relatively new trend in cognitive linguistics is a new understanding of metonymy, the concept of which has changed from a traditional figure of speech to a cognitive process. Al-Sharafi (2004) proposes a new term—textual metonymy, which argues that the referential function of metonymy can be considered as a main factor for constructing discourse cohesion and coherence, which means, metonymy, based on relations of causality and contiguity, is capable of providing a complete theory of discourse cohesion and coherence.The paper is based on Al-Sharafi's viewpoints and Radden and Kovecses's classification of metonymy. It tries to establish two links. One is the link between metonymy and cohesion, the other is the link between metonymy and coherence. With illustrations of examples, it is shown that cohesion and coherence can be realized through various types of metonymic process or metonymic relations.