A Study On Contiguity Of Metonymy During Its Course Of Expanding

Metonymy is very common in nature languages, which has attracted more and more attentions recently. Traditionally, metonymy is viewed as a figure of speech. Most scholars focus on classifying and cognitive motivation of metonymy. Cognitive linguists maintain that metonymy is not only a rhetoric device, but also a cognitive process from conceptual vehicle to conceptual target. When we discuss the view on metonymy, we can not neglect the contribution of the famous linguist, Roman Jacobson, who was considered as the first person associate the principle of combination. From then on, metonymy and metaphor are generally viewed as fundamental process of structuring of our knowledge. The notion of contiguity is very important in the definitions of metonymy. Traditional approaches consider contiguity as the relationship in the real world, while cognitive approaches put it at the conceptual level. It is not clear whether the relationship of metonymy is between entities or demain. And there is a problem that not all potential contiguity relations become an actual metonymy. As we all know, language own the feature of vagueness, which shows itself in each layer of language, from lexical items to grammar to pragmatics. Conceptual metonymy plays an important role on semantic change and understanding lexical meaning. The ambiguity of Chinese word class is mainly due to metonymic operation, especially for nouns and verbs, which provides evidence of " Chinese is a metonymic language". Panther&Thornburg consider indirect speech act as a kind of metonymy. Speakers prefer indirect ways which means that the illocutionary force is uttered by means of other speech acts, which is considered as metonymy controlled by dynamic context and pragmatic factors. Sperber&Wilson’s theory explain the function of metonymy in communication, and the relations between metonymy and pragmatic inference.The metonymy which has high conventionality does not need inference, for example "can you pass me the salt", without the help of cultural conventional,we can not construct the meaning of this sentence.