Metonymy Essay

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The metonymic way of an attributive description of the subject: cultural aspect As is well-known, a language is the cultural environment of its native speakers. No language can be analyzed or learned without entering into the cultural traditions of its speakers. For a linguist, it is very important to produce a complete description of these cultural traditions to underpin his ideas. Thus any phenomenon appearing in a language should be studied and described in close connection with its cultural usage and its cultural environment. Metonymy is an important way of expressing ideas, a cognitive process, consisting in the transference of meaning based on associations. A metonymic description of a subject is an essential part of any language therefore metonymic thinking can be considered as an element of the cultural identity of a person. Traditionally, metonymy was understood as a figure of speech used in rhetoric, or as a way of building a polysemic structure. The scholars also defined it as the relationship of a different nature between the objects and the phenomena of the real world (e.g. cause and result, part and whole). From the cognitive point of view, metonymic reconsideration is based on the cognitive processes of concept association that reflects the co-appearance frequency of objects of reality fixed by concepts. This paper investigates the concept of metonymy in the context of transcultural problems as a way of describing and characterizing the subject attributively; it aims at a reconsideration of the canonical classification of types of English metonymy (as it exists in the language and culture of the English-speaking countries and appears in the mental and cultural systems of a native speaker) on the basis of the degree of associativeness with the subject. By subject we understand the agent of an action or the experiencer of a state described or implied
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