On Interaction Between Metonymy And Linguistic Structure

With the vigorous development of cognitive linguistics in recent years, more and more researches start to regard metonymy as conceptual phenomena. Previous researches mostly put their focus on the definition of metonymy, the classification of metonymy, the nature of metonymy, the relationship between metaphor and metonymy and the metonymic foundation of semantic expansion, etc. Previously, how metonymy operates conceptually receives much more attention while grammatical constraints on conceptual metonymy have largely been neglected. Without linguistic structure, the interpretation of metonymy would seem to be far-fetched. Now in terms of linguistic structure, we can better see how conceptual metonymy is operated in specific linguistic contexts. Grammatical metonymy is prevalent in natural language. In natural language, we find that the metonymy is actually conditioned by linguistic structure. Without linguistic structure, we can never know to what target domain a source domain is mapped onto. Grammar will be better understood when it is analyzed from the perspective of conceptual metonymy. Likewise, conceptual metonymy will also be better understood when it is analyzed from the perspective of grammar. Recent years have seen a good momentum in the field of metonymy in grammar, with the increasing number of research members and many fruitful researches. Given relatively few researches about grammatical metonymy at home, the in-depth research in this field is necessary and meaningful. The paper tends to clarify the interaction between the grammatical structure and metonymy and explain some puzzling linguistic phenomenon by presenting the constraints put them by each other.