关联理论视角下浪漫主义诗歌中转喻的研究-外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

i i Abstract Traditionally, the researches on metonymy are mainly under the framework of rhetoric and cognitive linguistics. And there are theories on metonymy comprehension like Contact theory, Conceptual Highlighting Theory, Conceptual Integration Theory, etc. The diversity of theory suggests that there is no theory can perfectly describe and explain metonymy. Even the Conceptual Integration Theory, which has absorbed the essence part of many theories, can only partly explain the necessary condition and essential condition of a metonymy; they can’t illustrate the function of metonymy and its processing procedures (Sheng Jiaxuan, 2006). The interpretive power of relevance theory for metonymy derives from the fact that it disregards the strict distinction between literal and metonymical utterances. Sperber and Wilson claim that there is no substantial difference between the two. Thus, metonymy understanding needs no special mechanism but simply results from the search for an interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance in different contexts. The process of metonymy understanding still follows the ostensive-inferential model, which is applied by Sperber and Wilson to explain common verbal communication. It includes three sub-tasks: the identification of explicatures, the construction of contextual assumptions and the recovery of implicatures. Through the exploration of metonymy understanding in romantic poems, the present study leads to the following findings: Firstly, metonymy understanding is with the “mutual manifestness” as its prerequisite. And the metonymy is decoded into semantic representations which are then completed into a full propositional form through an inferential process. Then, the construction of contextual assumptions is constrained by the working memory. Meanwhile, the hearer follows a path of least effort, activating no more context than is necessary to understand a metonymical utterance. Based on these constraints, the i ii assumpt