A Conceptual Metonymic Approach To Generics

In view of inefficiency of existing theoretical framework on generics, this dissertation inventively addresses generics in the framework of cognitive linguistics, focusing on the theory of conceptual metonymy. According to cognitive linguistics, metonymy is, in nature, conceptual, instead of a rhetoric device. That is to say, metonymy is not simply a rhetoric ornament, but a conceptual phenomenon and cognitive process within the same ICM.As a special sentence type, generic sentences contribute a lot to the understanding of natural languages and have been a concern of semanticists, pragmatists and philosophers. The relevant studies abroad can be traced back as early as 17th century, but in China the researches in this field are very rare. Traditional studies of generics mainly focus on logical truth conditions and universal quantifications.Within the framework of conceptual metonymy, generics will obtain a comprehensive study from a new perspective. This dissertation makes efforts to reveal cognitive motivation of generics, holding that generics and metonymy are the same in the aspect of categorization and generalization, that generics'economy expression and incomplete statements are closely related to human's innately given capacity to generalize from instance to type, or from subtype to type, and communicating economically with least efforts and least expression is universally accepted rather than the vise verse. It is claimed, in this dissertation, that generics'syntax features and exceptions are both the natural result of metonymic mechanisms, and truth conditions should be judged in terms of certain ICMs rather than the correspondence between linguistic expressions and reality of the physical world.This dissertation not only provides a successful interpretation of generics by employing conceptual metonymy theory, but also demonstrates once again the superiority of cognitive linguistics. Besides, the results of this research shed light on children's language acquisition since generics are much more easily mastered than expressions with quantifiers.