Metonymies In English Major Textbooks From The Perspective Of ICM Theory And Their Relevation To Teaching Practice

Metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target. Lakoff proposed the Idealized Cognitive Model(ICM) to explicate on metonymic mechanism in 1987. The researches on metonymy are mainly in the field of cognitive linguistics, such as the nature, classifications, mechanism and pragmatic parameter of metonymy. These researches are at theoretical levels. There is still a gap in its practice in language teaching activities.This thesis employs Contemporary College English Intensive Reading(First Edition)(Book 1-4) edited by Limin Yang as its corpus. It makes a systematic literature review on metonymy, Idealized Cognitive Model and English teaching practice relating to metonymy; it also analyzes the corpus under the frame of ICM in a deductive way; in addition, it proposes some practical and constructive suggestions for English teaching based on the analyzed corpus as well.We found that ICM has strong potentials on interpretative on metonymic mechanism interpretation. For instance, referential metonymies can be discussed under the part-whole relation of non-generic ICM, low-level situational metonymies can be divided into default information, idioms and inferred situation and grammatical metonymies can be presented as recategorization, stative predicate, specific and generic, modal verbs. Moreover, under the scenario theory, illocutionary metonymies can be well explicated by ICM.In the frame of ICM, metonymic mechanism brings some relevation to English teaching practice. Consequently, students’ encyclopedic knowledge should be enriched and their conceptual structure should be reconstructed. Word-formation rules, image schema and positive transfer should be emphasized and applied. Cultural factors should be considered into teaching process and multiple teaching methods should be applied.