A Metaphtonymic Approach To The “Verb + Bodily Word” Structure In Chinese

The law that human being cognizes things from the near to the far,from the simple to the complicated,from the concrete to the abstract determines the fundamental role of human body in the cognition of the world.People often understand and experience other things with the knowledge of the body and the body parts as basis.At present,bodily words have become the objectives of cognitive linguists and many scholars have conducted research on Chinese bodily words from cultural perspective,cognitive perspective,and grammatical perspective.Nevertheless,related research mainly focus on such phenomena as polysemy,bodily words used as verbs and so forth,neglecting deep examination into syntactic structures involving body terms.Aimed at this deficiency,this thesis makes a research on the Chinese “Verb + bodily word” structure from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.On the ground of the 835 phrases of the “Verb + bodily word” structure collected from the online corpora called Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL)and the National Language of Modern Chinese Balance corpus,and Xinhua Dictionary of Chinese Idioms(2013),the thesis aims to make an investigation into the formation of the structure from the perspectives of conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy and metaphtonymy.Traditionally,metaphor and metonymy were treated as figures of speech and deviations of regular expression,while cognitive linguists regard metaphor and metonymy as not only linguistic phenomena,but also two kinds of cognitive thinking.Metaphor is to understand a relatively abstract domain by virtue of a more concrete domain.This thesis tends to strengthen the comprehension of the structure by analyzing the mappings between body parts and other domains.Metonymy refers to the cognitive process in which one conceptual entity provides mental access to another within the same idealized cognitive model(ICM),which makes some phrases within the “Verb + bodily word” structure become explicable.This thesis centers on the motivation of conceptual metonymy on the understanding and formation of these phrases.In the cognitive principle,metaphor and metonymy are distinct cognitive processes,but the demarcation between them is not clear-cut and they are in fact mutually exclusive.The metaphtonymy theory is put forward based on the interaction between them and this thesis discusses about the motivation of the theory on the Chinese “Verb + bodily word” structure.Based on the systematic study of the Chinese “Verb + bodily word” structure,this thesis finds that lots of the expressions in the structure have deeper cultural connotations which are different from the literal meaning.Metaphor and metonymy are the cognitive mechanisms which motivate the formation of the structure on both syntactic and semantic aspects.To some extent,this study expands the research scope of bodily words,and supports the cognitive theory on metaphor and metonymy.Meanwhile,it provides a new way for learners to acquire these expressions in the structure,and inspires the learning and teaching of this kind of phrases.