A Pragmatic Approach To The Production Of Anaphoric Metonymy

Contemporarily more and more attention has been attached to the study of metonymy as it has been found to be a more fundamental thinking pattern than metaphor. Anaphora is also a very important topic in discourse analysis, which refers to a referring relation between two linguistic elements in text or discourse. Though all kinds of researches concerning metonymy or anaphora can be found, a combination of them two has not aroused much attention among the linguists. This is what this thesis intends to deal with.Anaphoric metonymy, a phenomenon distinct from referential metonymy, is composed of referential metonymy and metonymic anaphor. It is presupposed by stereotypicality. Stereotypicality in anaphoric metonymy can be divided into one inside the preceding referential metonymy and one between the referential metonymy and the anaphor. The former emphasizes the stereotypicality between the source and the target of the preceding referential metonymy, while the latter refers to the stereotypicality between the preceding referential metonymy and the following metonymic anaphor. Generally speaking, the former can be further classified into general stereotypicality, which means the relation has been widely fossilized in people'mind and universally accepted, and specifically stereotypicalized, which means the relationship has been solidified in a group of people by the repeated use among them.Traditional researches concerning anaphoric metonymy are mainly confined to two approaches: fixed-anaphor interpretation and the analysis of predicate effect. Based on an analysis of the above approaches, this thesis proposes that stereotypicality is a crucial factor in the production of metonymic anaphor. According to the associative strength between the elements in referential metonymy and metonymic anaphor, stereotypicality is further divided into source-anaphor stereotypicality, target-anaphor stereotypicality and source/target-stereotypicality. The analysis of these relations has demonstrated the assumption about the crucial role of stereotypicality.Though stereotypicality is a crucial factor, in some cases linguistic context can exert much influence on certain stereotypical relations, determining the production of metonymic anaphor. In order to demonstrate the role of linguistic context and its relation to stereotypicality, a questionnaire is devised. The data from the questionnaire show that stereotypicality is a key factor in the production of metonymic anaphor. But this does not mean strong stereotypical relation alone can ensure the establishment of anaphoric metonymy. The real situation is that in some cases adequate linguistic context can alter the associative strength of the stereotypical relation, turning a once impossible relation to a possible one.