A Metonymic Approach To Classical Chinese Poetry

China is long appraised as a nation of poetry. Her long history has gifted Chinese language with the highest form of cultural heritage: the classical Chinese poetry (CCP), which enjoyed a reputation for its refined and delicate delineation of landscape and feeling in its unique aesthetic way. Traditional Chinese theory of interpretation and analysis of CCP usually focus on individual understanding aspect. For example, image and ideorealm are two important concepts in CCP interpretation. Style is another important method of composing as well as appreciating CCP.Viewed from a broader perspective, however, poetry is not only an aesthetic experience, but also a cognitive process. This point is also applied to Chinese classical poetry. In composing and appreciating poems, ancient Chinese poets created lots of images and endowed them with different symbolic meanings of which different school of analysis will generate different interpretation, among which a cognitive analysis is comparably rare.Thus this thesis tends to give a cognitive analysis of CCP from the perspective of metonymy. Up to now, theories about cognitive analysis of poetry mostly set target on American and European poetry. What is more, the foreign school of cognitive analysis of poetry is mostly founded in metaphor. There is a temporal shortage of research on metonymy phenomenon in poetry, especially with regard to CCP.Within this thesis, the author intends to interpret CCP under current cognitive metonymic theory so as to reach a new understanding of CCP as well as the prospect of cognitive metonymy in application of Chinese cultural text. It is found that many Chinese ancient poems, throughout history, are constructed on the basis of metonymic conception. Through the conceptualization of the ever-changing world, CCP provides with successors priceless treasure to touch as well as to examine, whatever in viewing it as an entity or in analyzing it into individual poetic elements or factors under the light of cognitive metonymy.The thesis firstly interprets CCP as an entity in metonymic conception. It is evident that the two most important aspects of CCP are the image and the theme. The construction and aesthetic experience of this two aspect stand as the mainstream of CCP. In the image construction, it is found that the color image as well as the botany image are two distinguishing aspect that deserves specific and thorough research. Nearly all the colors existing in the natural world can be found in classical Chinese poetry. It is due the salient feature of those typical colors that they always metonymically projected to beauty, to social rank, as well as to places and cultural connotations. From these projection and we can find metonymy conception such as COLOR FOR PERSON, COLOR FOR STATUS, COLOR FOR EMOTION that function as the bridge in interpreting and understanding CCP. In classical Chinese poetry, the frequent mentioning of flowers, leaves, trees and grass follows certain usage according to their salient features, time and location so as to get changing aesthetic experience in different levels of conceptualization. One of the popular is what the type of metonymy that one element for a class may be taken to stand for the whole class. Thus in the Flower ICM, the salient element of its red and purple color are taken for the whole class of the vast sea of flower. It is in harmony with the traditional interpreting method as well. The Tree ICM, on the other side, is mostly under the PART-PART and PART-WHOLE category. The theme of CCP is in great sense realized by the metonymic inference of the surrounding elements to create certain emotions.Next, this approach touches the elementary level of individual classical poem. The number, noun and adjective are three poetic elements in CCP that are frequently found in metonymic conceptualization. The thesis finds that number ONE, THREE, FOUR are frequently emerge in CCP with metonymic inference. They also help to the construction of the emotions or themes that successfully realized through the metonymic inference. The notion of "contiguity" is not merely located in the world of reality but at the conceptual level and operating within one idealized cognitive model (ICM). Viewed throughout the whole contents of CCP, this ICM construct is very frequently appeared in poetic nouns, and account for several types of ICMs which distinctively in Clothing ICM, Place ICM, Person ICM, as well as Object ICM, etc. With regard to the contents of CCP, the target object that depicts is often the result of the attribute of an object or conception with contiguous character before the ultimate metonymic image or concept emerges. This noun-noun or adjective-noun projection is very popular in classical Chinese poems as well. As a matter of fact, metonymy phenomenon is found every where and serves as different cognitive types. In applying cognitive metonymy to interpretation of Chinese classical poetry, it provides a new perspective in the study of CCP. And it bears realistic meaning in CCP translation as well. Cognitive metonymy provides implications for how we should study our valuable heritage in modern times, whether the intention is actually to preserve them in museum or to make them prevalent in world literature. Cultural barrier is the most difficult problem in introducing Chinese culture (in which classical Chinese poetry possesses a crucial position) to foreigners. In this respect, applying more prevalent and modern cognitive theory to interpret ancient Chinese poems might be an enlightening choice. Thus, it is meaningful and significant in propelling the culture communication and understanding.