A cognitive study of metaphor and metonymy. Plan: I. Introduction II. Main part

 
 

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Traditional studies usually regard metonymy and metaphor as rhetoric 
devices 
Traditional studies usually regard metonymy and metaphor as rhetoric 
devices, a figure of speech since Aristotle Period (384-322 BC) while in the 
book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) revolutionized the 
concepts of metonymy and metaphor. They found that metonymy and 
metaphor are not merely rhetoric devices that people have always believed 
them to be. Instead, they function also in people’s conceptual system and 
play a significant role in shaping how people think and behave. They are the 
means by which it is possible to ground our conceptual systems 
experimentally, and to reason in a constrained but creative fashion (Johnson, 
1992: p. 351) . As language is linked closely with one’s thinking, the 
language-based research they conduct sheds light on how people actually 
think and behave. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pointed out “Human 
conceptual systems are pervasively structured by metaphor, metonymy and 
other kinds of imaginative structure”. Later, Lakoff (1993) adapted the 
definition of “metaphor” as “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual 
system”. In the title of the thesis, not only metaphor but also metonymy is 
mentioned. Both of them are the most important ways in which man construe 
the word. Metaphor and metonymy are similar in that both function in such a 
mechanism that one thing is understood or interpreted in terms of 
another. Lakoff & Turner (1989) pointed out several distinguishing features 
of metaphor and metonymy: 
1) In metaphor there are two conceptual domains, while metonymy 
involves only one conceptual domain; 
2) Metonymy, but not metaphor, involves a “stand-for” relationship 
between the source and target domains; 

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3) In metaphor a whole schematic structure, called the source domain, 
is mapped, together with its accompanying logic, onto another whole 
schematic structure, called the target domain; the function of the mapping is 
to allow us to understand and reason about the target in terms of the source. 
In contrast, a metonymy is primarily used for reference: we refer to an entity 
by means of another entity. 
What could be simpler and more obvious than colors? The sky is blue. 
Fresh grass is green. Blood is red. The sun and moon are yellow. It has been 
estimated that human eyes can discriminate no fewer than 7.5 million just 
noticeable color differences (Brown & Lenneberg, 1954) . There are good 
reasons for describing color terms and color metaphors. The color domain is 
one of what Langacker Ronald (1987: p. 148) called “basic domains”, which 
are not reducible to others, i.e., more primitive cognitive structure, and which 
are bodily grounded concepts that enable the further structuring of our 
understanding of the world. Berlin and Kay (1969) concluded that there exist 
universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories, which serve 
as the psychophysical referents of the eleven or fewer basic color terms in 
any language in the following order. 
From Figure 1, it is obvious that “white” and “black” are the basic 
color words. In previous studies, many studies focus on the comparison 
between English and Chinese color metaphor. They chose several different 
colors as models. But studies on “black” color in a single language appear 
relatively rare. Therefore, in this paper, we choose the representative 
color―black, as a model and study its metonymic and metaphorical use in 
only one language―English. What is more, this paper not only analyzes the 
symbolic meaning of “black” color but also makes a detailed analysis of 
“black” color under the framework of metaphorical mapping, which helps 
form the cognitive thinking about 

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Figure 1. An evolutionary sequence of basic color lexicon. 
metonymy and metaphor. 
In the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle is often situated as the 
first commentator on the nature of metaphor, writing in the 
Poetics
, "A 
'metaphorical term' involves the transferred use of a term that properly 
belongs to something else,"
[5]
 and elsewhere in the