A Study Of Text Coherence From The Perspective Of Speech Act Metonymy

In traditional study, metonymy is usually taken as a kind of figure of speech or linguistic means to achieve certain communicative effect. However, with the development of cognitive linguistics, it is generally realized that metonymy, like metaphor, is also a process of cognition and an important method for human to understand the world. It's rooted in people's basic experience and constitutes our ordinary thinking and behavior model. Some scholars even claim metonymy is more basic than metaphor. Human invented language to express their intent and ideas just because of metonymic thinking. That is, language is metonymic in nature. Metonymy plays a key role in generating and understanding discourse.Thornburg and Panther (1997) deal with metonymy from a new perspective and propose the concept of speech act metonymy, which is a new claim in the field of cognitive linguistics. They believe that metonymy is an instrument in indirectly accomplishing linguistic actions such as promises, offers, and requests. A speaker can perform a speech act by mentioning an attribute of that speech act, just as a speaker can refer to a person by mentioning an attribute of that person.Since metonymy is the basic principle of human beings' cognitive structure, it is supposed to offer support for meaning construction in textual level. This study is trying to set up a metonymic textual model based on the theory of Panther and Thornburg's action scenario incorporating with Li Yongzhong's pragmatic parameters with the purpose of making a tentative study on the interpretation role in textual coherence and the function in meaning generation of the speech act metonymy. The author will take three literature fragments as samples to have case study and deep analysis on the coherent function of the speech act metonymy.The paper, analyzing text coherence from the perspective of speech act metonymy, raises the study of metonymy to textual level and makes contribution for extending and perfecting the metonymic study. It also sets a new way for us to analyze text coherence from the cognitive perspective and becomes a supplement and development of functional discourse analysis.