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Metonymy and Its Function for Discourse Coherence

Author: GuoLi
Tutor: MaBaoJin
School: Henan University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Coherence Metonymy Type Hierarchy Inherence Schema
CLC: H05
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 298
Quote: 2
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Abstract

As a concept, coherence was first proposed by Widdowson in 1973. After the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English in 1976, the analysis of coherence began to attract much attention of linguists. In the last three decades, with the rapid development of linguistics and other disciplines, many scholars have explored discourse coherence from different perspectives and have proposed various theories, such as Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion Device, Grice’s Conversational Implicature, Widdowson’s Illocutionary Speech Act, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and others. All these studies did great contributions to the development of text linguistics and discourse analysis. However, few scholars studied coherence from cognitive perspective, not to mention from the perspective of metonymy.Since 1980’s, with the development of psychology and cognitive science, many scholars recognize that the traditional view of metonymy is too narrow. In fact, metonymy is not only a rhetorical device but also a fundamental phenomenon which shapes the way we think and speak. Among all the studies of conceptual metonymy, Lakoff’s idealized cognitive models is widely accepted in cognitive linguistics. However, the idealized cognitive models still can not provide a persuasive explanation to the metonymic mappings between different domains. Thus, the Chinese scholar, Xu Shenghuan puts forward the Inherence of Connotation(s) and Denotations), which toghther with Type Hierarchy Structure provides a solid framework for the analysis of generative mechanism in metonymic expressions.Since metonymy is a fundamental conceptual phenomenon, metonymic thinking would play an important role in the interpretation and even the generation of discourse. And this is the point we will explore in this paper.In this thesis, based on Xu’s Type Hierarchy Structure and Inherence of Connotation(s) and Denotation(s), together with Al-Sharafi’s Schema Theory, we will try to analyze discourse coherence from the perspective of metonymy, especially the discourse that is composed of metonymic expressions.The thesis falls into six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction of the dissertation. In this chapter, we answer three questions as what is the topic of this thesis, why we choose this topic and how to conduct the topic.Chapter Two is a comprehensive survey of previous studies on coherence. In this chapter, firstly, we make distinction between the concepts of discourse and text. Then, based on different theories, we review previous studies on coherence from semantic, pragmatic and psychological perspectives respectively.Chapter Three is a broad overview of previous studies on metonymy. In this chapter, from rhetorical, semantic, pragmatic, structuralist and cognitive perspectives, we explore the traditional approaches of metonymy research and propose our cognitive analysis on metonymy from a new angle.Chapter Four is the theoretical framework of our study in this paper. Based on Xu Shenghuan’s relevant theories, especially type hierarchy structure and inherence theory, together with Al-Sharafi’s schema theory, we try to form a unified framework for our discourse analysis in this paper.Chapter Five is the application of Xu’s theories in metonymic analysis. Together with Al-Sharafi’s schema theory, we explore the discourse coherence from the perspective of metonymy. Based on series analysis on coherence, especially the coherence of discourse which is composed of metonymic expressions, we finally conclude that metonymy not only plays an important role in linguistic expression but also plays an important role in discourse coherence.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis. In this chapter, we summarize the findings, point out the limitation of the research and directions for further research.

Metonymy and Its Function for Discourse Coherence

Abstract

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