Semantic Prosody Of Head In Cognitive Metonymy

Cognitive researches on metonymy presents wide, insightful, and interdisciplinarydevelopmental trends. With the development of corpus linguistics, a combination ofquantitative and qualitative method is becoming an inevitable tendency. However,semantic prosody, as a hot research issue in corpus has seldom been analyzed fromthe perspective of cognitive metonymy. The thesis analyzed the semantic prosody ofhead in cognitive metonymy based on the sub corpus—news corpus in BrighamYoung University-British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). A quantitative andqualitative method is employed to study semantic prosody of head.The study showed that the word head had various metonymic meanings in newsdiscourse. In general, the metonymic expressions of head had a neutral semanticprosody both in conceptual and grammatical metonymies. However, under someitems, there were some rules to follow. When used as the meaning of mind, head hada negative semantic prosody trend; when used as the meaning of length in news sportdiscourse, head had a negative semantic prosody trend; it had positive semanticprosody trend when used as the meaning of leading and it had negative semanticprosody trend when followed by abstract nouns. At the same time, the study alsofound out context in news discourse limited the recognition of metonymy. In thesampling, text-context and cultural context had clear restrictive function. Undermetonymic expressions, context provided sufficient contextual information forsemantic prosody of head in different items.