Menonymy from the Cognitive Poin of View

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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE, YOUTH AND SPORTS OF UKRAINE BORYS GRINCHENKO KYIV UNIVERSITY Humanitarian institute Department of English Philology Individual Project Work in Stylictics “ Metonymical figures of speech from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics ” Completed by: Student 3d year Group FAb-2-10-4.0d Olena Zavolokina Kyiv - 2013 Introduction The research of metonymy has a history of more than two thousand years, and its study develops from traditional rhetorical research to modern cognitive research. Rhetoricians and linguists have taken it for granted for a long time that metonymy is a figurative language. It is claimed that metonymy operates on names of things; it involves the substitution of name of one thing for that of another and the two things are somehow associated. The cognitive view of metonymy makes different assumptions from the traditional opinions. Metonymy is believed to be a conceptual phenomenon; it is an important means for people to know the world and enrich the language; and it is a way of thinking used widely in people’s daily life. The study of metonymy from the cognitive view is a great help for people to understand the cognitive and conceptual nature of metonymy, and it will shed new light on the English vocabulary teaching. 1. The cognitive nature of metonymy 1.1 The cognitive definition of metonymy The traditional definitions of metonymy are carried out under the assumption that metonymy is a figurative device to provide some charm and grandeur to the style, and, the researches are all defined to the lexical level yet without treating it as a phenomenon in everyday language and normal modes of thinking. It is believed that most of the basic insights into the tropes of metonymy started from Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, who subsumed metonymy and synecdoche under metaphor (Panther

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