The Textual Cohesion And Coherence Of Metonymy In Fortress Besieged

Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980,metaphor regarded as a kind of cognitive mechanism has brought a dramatic change to traditional rhetoric,which renders metaphor the focus while metonymy,the shadow.In the 1980 s,little attention was paid to the study of metonymy.In the late 1990 s,metonymy gradually drew increasing attention from researchers and began to yield important results like the publications of monographs.In recent years,the research of metonymy has gained increasing attention from different researchers in various fields.In cognitive linguistics,metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity,the vehicle,provides mental access to another conceptual entity,the target,within the same idealized cognitive model.Novel,one of the literary forms,has a particular characteristic.The language of literary writings origins from our daily life,however,it is usually polished and revised by the authors to pursue the beauty of literature.Due to its omnipresence,metonymy plays an indispensable role in the literary writings and daily communication.Fortress Besieged,a renowned novel written by Ch’ien Chung-shu,is full of abundant simile,metaphor,and metonymy,which have sparked a wealth of relevant research,ranging from literary,aesthetics and linguistics.A crowd of researchers analyzed this well-known literature from the perspectives of translation,pragmatics,and cognitive linguistics.Until now,few researchers,however,have touched upon the angle of metonymy in the study of this novel.Therefore,this thesis analyzes Fortress Besieged from the textual cohesion and coherence of metonymy based on its whole chapters and aims to find out how metonymy accounts for its textual cohesion and coherence in this novel.Through the detailed qualitative analysis,this thesis finds that metonymy effectively accounts for the textual cohesion in Fortress Besieged through the decreasing mapping,the expanding mapping and the mapping from several sources domains to one target domain.In Fortress Besieged,metonymy gives a full explanation of textual coherence through the expanding mapping,the mapping from several sources domains to one target domain,the mapping from one source domain to several target domains,and the mapping from the source domain projecting to the target domain then working as another source domain projecting to another target domain.The study in this thesis not only lays a foundation for the target readers to understand the characterization,environmental description,representation of events or plots,and the literary charm of this classic novel,but also expands the research area of metonymy in Chinese traditional literature.