A Corpus-based Study of Metonymy in Mandarin Spoken Discourse
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Wu, Chih-Yi
DOI
en-US
Abstract
This corpus-based study explores how conceptual metonymy is empirically manipulated in Mandarin talk-in-interaction and how its patterns reflect the existing cognitive and pragmatic theoretical claims.
Metonymy is a conceptual mechanism that basically characterizes a stand-for relation. It was previously deemed a subsidiary device subordinate to metaphor and thus received relatively little attention. Recently, however, it has aroused some scholarly interest in its operation and function; yet the discussion is largely theoretical and notional in nature. Few efforts have been made to probe into how it manifests itself in real use of language. Owing to the lack of empirical evidences, this study sees the need of looking into its authentic representation and sets out to empirically investigate how it is patterned in naturally-produced spoken discourse. Specifically, we examine metonymic manifestation at two linguistic levels: the referential (entity) and the illocutionary (event/action) designation.
The result shows that in terms of referential metonymy, WHOLE FOR PART metonymic relation is more frequently exploited than PART FOR WHOLE, which supports the view that a whole is more salient than its parts. Moreover, it is argued that the exploitation of both referential metonymic relations is cognitively motivated by perceptual saliency and interactional saliency respectively to achieve the communicative goal of optimal relevance. In addition, there are entrenched uses of referential metonymies observed in our corpus data, which reveals how our recurrent interaction with outer environment gives rise to the saliency of particular concepts and how these concepts, universal or culture-specific alike, further lead to language routinization.
In terms of illocutionary metonymy, it is found that Mandarin speakers mainly orient toward the use of CORE FOR WHOLE metonymy. This is argued to be cognitively motivated by the conceptual prominence of the CORE stage in a speech act scenario. Moreover, the exploitation of other metonymic relations is also well grounded on the pragmatic factors including the social concern of politeness and the communicative purpose of relevance. By and large, the manipulation of illocutionary metonymy is argued to reflect the force of (inter)subjectivity.
Overall, this empirical study reveals that the exploitation of metonymy has its cognitive and pragmatic purposes and functions. Cognitively speaking, metonymy is an important construal phenomenon and a process of perspectivization displaying our ability to highlight saliency in a given conceptual structure. In terms of its pragmatic motivation, metonymy should be regarded as both a strategy to attain to different levels of politeness and a device which speakers rely on to create the maximal contextual effect to ultimately achieve optimal relevance in communication. Finally it is noted that context serves as the prerequisite for the production and interpretation of metonymy. Interlocutors must base on contextual resources at hand to plan and think about how to say and how to understand metonymic expressions.
All in all, this thesis uncovers the patterning of metonymy in Mandarin spoken discourse, demonstrating that its exploitation is cognitively and pragmatically motivated. More importantly, with this empirical investigation we manifest how constantly human beings think and speak metonymically.
Subjects
指涉性轉喻
語言行為轉喻
觀點化
禮貌
關聯理論
語境
referential metonymy
illocutionary metonymy
perspectivization
politeness
relevance theory
context
Type
other
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