PHƯƠNG THỨC CHUYỂN NGHĨA HOÁN dụ TRONG TIẾNG ANH đối CHIẾU với TIẾNG VIỆT

While studying about the transference of meaning we have found that metonymy, a means of transference of meaning basing on contiguity between objects, is a powerful way to use language e

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If vocabulary is one of the most essential parts of a language, enriching vocabulary plays a very important role in learning and using that language Among many issues related to vocabulary, transference of meaning is now being paid a lot of attention because being aware of this will be helpful to any language learners While studying about the transference of meaning we have found that metonymy, a means of transference of meaning basing on contiguity between objects, is a powerful way to use language effectively and creatively However, not many people are aware of it and not many studies have chosen metonymy as their main subject For that reason we choose the metonymy as the subject to study and make a contrastive analysis between that in English and Vietnamese The study is aimed at giving readers a general view on the metonymy as the transference of meaning in English and pointing out the features that English and Vietnamese share with, and differ from, each other in the ways of forming and using metonymy Besides, we suggest some activities for teachers of English to help their students and learners of English to enrich their vocabulary as well as avoid and self-correct mistakes in communication and translation

This research consists of three main parts The first part, Introduction, gives general information about the rationale, the aim, the scope, the methods and certainly the design of the study The second part, Development, includes four chapters Chapter 1 discusses some related matter to the study as language, word, meaning of word and the changes of those The last part in this chapter presents the term transference of meaning, its causes and its means Chapter 2 and chapter 3 are the focus of the study which give an overview of metonymy in English and Vietnamese, then contrast them to find out any similarities and differences The final chapter is the implication in language teaching and translation The last part, Conclusion, summarizes what have been discussed in the study and gives some general comments on the use of metonymy in English and Vietnamese as well as supplies some suggestions for further study

1.1.2 Reasons for the change of language

1.1.3 How language changes

1.2 Word and its meaning

1.2.1 What is the word?

1.2.2 Word meaning

1.2.3 The change and development of meaning

1.3 Transference of meaning

1.3.1 What is transference of meaning?

1.3.2 Means of meaning transference

Chapter 2:

2.1 What is Metonymy?

2.2 Metonymy vs Metaphor

2.3 Types of metonymy

2.3.1 Direct, or primary, metonymy

2.3.2 Indirect, or secondary, metonymy

2.4 Cases of metonymy

2.4.1 Name of container to refer to the thing contained

2.4.2 Name of parts of human body used as symbols

2.4.3 The concrete to refer to the abstract

2.4.4 Materials to refer to the things made of the materials

2.4.5 Name of the author to refer to his work

2.4.6 Part to refer to a whole and vice versa

2.4.7 Symbol to refer to representative

3.1.3 Name of author – his work

3.1.4 Part - whole and whole – part

3.1.5 Owner (people) and things owned (clothes, properties)

3.1.6 Specific quantities – general quantities; singular – plurals

3.1.7 Others

3.2 The similarities between metonymy in English and that in Vietnamese

3.3 The differences between metonymy in English and that in Vietnamese

Chapter 4:

4.1 Implications in English language teaching to Vietnamese learners

4.2 Implications in English – Vietnamese translation and vice versa

As is well-known, a language is the cultural environment of its native speakers No language can be analysed 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

However, in everyday life we use language without any awareness of the term metonymy

in mind Even in linguistics, it seems that metonymy has been paid little concern in comparison with another means of meaning transference called metaphor

Besides, while teaching English for Vietnamese students, most of them are at intermediate level of English, we find that they are sometimes shocked when encountering some cases like:

pre-The ham sandwich has asked for the bill

English is our mother tongue

Also they tend to spend a lot of time to find the English equivalents for the expressions of Vietnamese such as:

Ngay khi công vi c c giao m i ng i u ph i x n tay áo lên làm ngay

Chân i mà d ch ng r i – D u xa chín núi không nguôi m t lòng

These problems deeply rooted from people’s unawareness of the term metonymy as well as the similarities and differences between metonymy in English and Vietnamese

Therefore, we choose the metonymy as the subject to study and make a contrastive analysis between which in English and Vietnamese

This study has both theoretical and practical aims

Theoretically, it is intended to provide a thorough and systematic study on the metonymy

as the transference of meaning in English Besides, it is aimed at finding the features that English and Vietnamese share with, and differ from, each other in the ways of forming and using metonymy

Practically, this study is intended to help Vietnamese learners of English to have an insight into metonymy as the transference of meaning in English as well as in their mother tongue

so that they can enrich their vocabulary, avoid and self-correct mistakes in communication and translation Teachers of English can also benefit from this study when we are going to describe some activities helping students enrich their vocabulary through learning metonymy

The study will touch to the different cases of metonymy as the transference of meaning in English and Vietnamese and find the similarities and differences in the way each language employs metonymy However, for the limitation of personal knowledge and ability, this study only analyses things basing on some most common metonymy of the words that can

be found and traditionally used in communication in both languages

In this study the two languages namely English and Vietnamese are compared and contrasted Here, English is treated as the instrumental language and Vietnamese is the target language Therefore, any cases of metonymy in English will be mentioned and analysed first, then they will be compared and contrasted with Vietnamese to find out the similarities and differences between the two languages

We have read some books and researches discussing the metonymy in both English and Vietnamese and extracted some general cases of metonymy in English and Vietnamese which is the means of meaning transference Basing ourselves on that we supplement more

data from our real situations and analyse them separately in each language At last, we formulate the contrasts which have been identified by the before analyses

Part I is Introduction providing with the rationale, the aims, the scope, the methodology and the overall structure of the study This introductory part functions as the leading direction for the whole study about why it comes into being, for what purposes it is used, what exactly it studies, how it is carried out and how it is organised

Part II is Development, the body of the thesis, including four chapters Chapter 1 Theoritical bacground discusses some related matter to the study In the first part we will look at language in general and its changes which can partly explain the reasons of meaning transference later We also spend time to study about words and word meaning including approaches to word meaning and the changes of word meaning The last part in this chapter presents the term transference of meaning, its causes and its means

Chapter 2 and chapter 3 are the focus of the study Chapter 2 Metonymy as the transference of meaning in English In this chapter we will attempt to define the term

“metonymy”, compare it with another means of transference of meaning named

“metaphor”, classify it into two types, and then go into details in the cases of metonymy This chapter provides an overall view about metonymy, therefore all necessary information for analysing and contrasting in the next chapter is mentioned

Chapter 3 is called A contrastive analysis of Metonymy in English and in Vietnamese

In order to make a contrastive analysis, we will take a look at the metonymy in Vietnamese Then, the similarities and differences between metonymy in English and in Vietnamese will be discussed

The last chapter, Implications for language teaching and translation, will give some ideas that will be helpful to teachers of language in their language teaching career and to translators in the process of translation relating to this subject

Part III is Conclusion providing the summary of what has been analysed and found as well

as some concluding remarks made to these findings Lastly, it supplies some suggestions for further study

“ideas, emotions and desires” More than that, it is undeniable that people possesses many systems of voluntarily produced symbols like gestures, postures, eye-gaze, etc that metaphorically called ‘body language’

Saussure (1960:8) defined language as ‘both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty’ This definition suggests that language is distinguished from speech and that it is a social product and its unity is a collection of necessary conventions which is accepted and exercised by members in the society or community

It is obvious that language does not stay the same as a set of constant things but changes over time in both its forms and contents (meanings)

1.1.2 Reasons for the change of language

Language change, according to the Wikipedia, is the manner in which the phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over time All languages are continually changing At any given moment the English language, for example, has a huge variety within itself, and this variety is known as synchronic variation From these different forms comes the effect on language over time known as diachronic change Two linguistic disciplines concern themselves with studying language change: historical linguistics and sociolinguistics Historical linguists examine how a language was spoken in the past and seek to determine how present languages derive from

it and are related to one another Sociolinguists are interested in the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language Languages change for a variety of reasons In his report “Language change”, available at National Science Foundation website, Mahoney has pointed out some causes of language change as follow

Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and political pressures History records many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization and migration Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if enough users alter the way they speak it

Frequently, the needs of speakers drive language change New technologies, industries, products and experiences simply require new words Plastic, cell phones and the Internet didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time, for example By using new and emerging terms, we all drive language change But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language change That’s because no two individuals use a language in exactly the same way The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education level, social status and other factors Through our interactions, we pick up new words and sayings and integrate them into our speech Teens and young adults for example, often use different words and phrases from their parents Some of them spread through the population and slowly change the language

1.1.3 How language changes

According to Mahoney, there are three main aspects of language change over time: vocabulary, sentence structure and pronunciations Vocabulary can change quickly as new words are borrowed from other languages, or as words get combined or shortened Some words are even created by mistake As noted in the Linguistic Society of America's publication Is English Changing?, pea is one such example Up until about 400 years ago, pease referred to either a single pea or many peas At some point, people mistakenly assumed that the word pease was the plural form of pea, and a new word was born While vocabulary can change quickly, sentence structure—the order of words in a sentence—changes more slowly Yet it is clear that today’s English speakers construct sentences very differently from Chaucer and Shakespeare’s contemporaries Changes in sound are somewhat harder to document, but at least as interesting For example, during the so-called

“Great Vowel Shift” 500 years ago, English speakers modified their vowel pronunciation dramatically This shift represents the biggest difference between the pronunciations of so called Middle and Modern English

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1.2.1 What is the word?

Like other terms in linguistics, ‘words’ is defined in many different ways basing on different angels from which the researchers or linguists view the language or depending on the purposes of each study

Jack C Richards in “Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics” defined a word as “the smallest of the linguistic units which can occur on its own in speech or writing” However, it is not easy to apply this criterion consistently in the cases of function words (like ‘the’, etc.) and contraction (like ‘can’ and ‘can’t’, etc.) (p.406)

According to A Meillet, ‘the word is defined by a combinating between a certain meaning and sound structure which shows a grammatical feature.’ This definition relates to three aspects of the word: semantics (meaning), phonology (sound structure) and grammatical function (grammatical feature)

Also concerning to both the form and the content of the word, Hoang Tat Truong in “Basic English Lexicology” (1993:2) defines the word as “dialectical unity of form and content,

independent unit of language capable to form a sentence by itself.” However, we can find the new point here that it clarifies the independent characteristic of the word as a language unit

In the following parts of this thesis we can simply take this as the working definition provided that we are aware of a problem that the relationship between form and content is not always one-to-one This relationship can be direct or indirect, then one word can mean different things indirectly

1.2.2 Word meaning

There has been quite a number of attempts designed to define what the meanings of the word is From one of the oldest views – the theory of naming – a word in a language stands for or refers to an object It means that words are just names or labels for the things While this idea works very well with nouns, it is not really easy to extend the theory with other parts of speech such as prepositions, adjectives, articles, etc Moreover, this theory is workable in the real world containing objects which we can see or know, but it seems that the theory can not work effectively in the imaginary world made up of things such as fairy, angel, etc or the abstract things

Because of the naming theory’s limitation, linguists try to explain the term in another way They realize that it is needed to distinguish what a word denotes from what they can be used to refer to According to this view, word meaning can be divided into denotation and reference Denotation is the ability of a word to identify all those things or objects that are correctly covered by it The denotation of a word or expression is the invariant and utterance- independent Reference is the relationship that holds between a word or expression and the objects it refers to Reference, therefore, is variable and utterance-dependent

Nguyen Hoa in his book “An introduction to Semantics” (2001: 14-16) has discussed many theories of meaning of which we hereby can mention some of the following According to the referential (or denotational) approach, the meaning of a word or expression is what it refers to, denotes, or stands for The ideational (or mentalistic) theories, on the other hand, considers it the idea, or concept associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands the word The meaning of word, according to the verificationist theory, is determined by the verifiability of the sentences, or propositions, containing it, i.e the

meaning of word is verified by concrete situation Linguists following functionalist theory, however, divide the word meaning into ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning Bloomfieldian linguistics defines the meaning as the situation in which it

is used Meanwhile in the former Soviet Union, there is a common agreement that meaning is the realisation of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system Whatever the theory is, it seems that all linguists share the same view that word meaning does not stay the same all the time but change slightly or clearly in different situations 1.2.3 The change and development of meaning

If the history of semantic change had to be summed up as one process, it would be that of specialization The Anglo Saxons 1500 years ago made with perhaps 30,000 words in their complete vocabulary, while Modern English has anywhere from 500,000 to a million words, depending on whether or not scientific vocabularies are included

It could be argued that originally there was one word, from which all others have sprung The origins of language will never be known, but the first language probably had a vocabulary of a few hundred words, providing a rich enough vocabulary for a primitive people who had few materials and fewer abstract concepts Many of the words of the first languages had very broad senses of meaning

If you seek to create a language from an earlier time, you should probably develop a small vocabulary, with it words having much more overlapping of meaning than the vocabularies

of modern languages Imagine a word spiratholmos an ancient ancestor to Latin inspirare meaning "wind, breath, voice, spirit." A speaker who used the word spiratholmos would regard the wind in the trees as the breath of the earth, the voice of God, the spirit animating each of us

Semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word Every word has a variety of senses and connotations which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that words of one time period mean quite different things to the same words as spoken in a previous time

According to McMahon (1994:185), there are at least two causes of semantic change Coming first is structural causes This category refers to the linguistic structure of lexical items The limited number of phonemes/morphemes reduces, as such, the possible contexts

for these elements By striking contrast with the morphophonemic part, there are no a priori context limits related to the meaning of a word, concerning its possible connotations and positions in a sentence In addition, lexical fields allow for powerful semantic interaction among their members, though the results are usually visible only after the conclusion of the process Besides, language changes because of referential causes This category includes changes affecting the referent, i.e the object or thing that a linguistic unit stands for Normally, progress in technology and culture goes along with changes in items, materials, tools and concepts Nevertheless, since language abides to the principle of economy (old means - new usages), a certain delay in following that progress is certainly expectable The system of any given language will most likely extend the semantic field of

an existing word in order to cover the new usage rather than create a new lexeme

Structural and referential here, in fact, refer to what people call linguistic and extra linguistic causes to the change of meaning Structural or linguistic causes are all factors acting within the language, connected with the system of language such as the ellipsis or contraction of a phrase, the discrimination of synonyms, and the attraction of synonyms Meanwhile, referential or extra linguistic causes are connected with the development of society, changes in social, political, economic, cultural life, in science and technology.The four most widely recognised types of semantic change are extension, narrowing, amelioration, and pejoration [McMahon, 1994] The first two represent changes in a word's scope, while the second pair can also cover changes in a word's individual meanings Extension is the widening of a word's range of meanings, often by analogy or simplification For example, virtue was initially a quality that could only be applied to men, like our modern word manliness, but in contemporary society, it can equally be applied to women as well

Narrowing is the reduction in a word's range of meanings, often limiting a generic word to

a more specialised or technical use For example, broadcast originally meant "to cast seeds out;" with the advent of radio and television, the word was extended to indicate the transmission of audio and video signals Today, because of narrowing, very few people outside of agricultural circles use broadcast in the earlier sense

Amelioration occurs as a word loses negative connotations or gains positive ones For example, mischievous used to mean "disastrous", where it now only means "playfully annoying"

Pejoration occurs as a word develops negative connotations or loses positive ones For example, the word gay, which can mean happy or colorful and was used commonly until it became a reference to homosexuals While this may or may not have been a euphemisation

in itself, the word in the original sense is avoided

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1.3.1 What is transference of meaning?

By the term transference of meaning Nguyen Hoa (2001:64) refers to the situation when one object is named and understood in terms of another In other words, one word can extend its meaning or narrow its meaning to refer to another object (another referent) Let’s take an example to make this point clear:

Please put your hands on your head

Such clever boy is the head of our group

Salary in this company is rather high about $700 per head per month

In the first sentence, the word “head” is used with its original meaning as a top part of a body The second sentence, however, employs the word differently when it does not refer

to a person’s head but a person who lead the whole group For the head containing the brain of the human beings has the function of controlling other parts of the human body Obviously, the leader here is named by a part of human body basing on the similarity of function The word “head” in the last example, otherwise, has transferred its meaning to refer to a person basing on the part-whole relation

The three sentences have shown us that one word can be used differently to name different things because those things and the original referent of the word have somewhat relation The transference of meaning, like what we have discussed about language change and semantic change, results both from linguistic and extra linguistic causes In the process of cognition of the world, and in the process of using language effectively and creatively, human beings try to use one linguistic element to refer to different things Besides, when the new or the professional concepts come into life, language needs to be changed accordingly

There are various ways of transferring a word meaning into the new ones and all of those base on certain relations or reasons That explains why we are now having some means of transference of meaning as mentioned in the following part

1.3.2 Means of meaning transference

The transference of meaning thanks to variety means like metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, irony, etc

Metaphor is one of the basic type of semantic transference which bases on similarity between the two objects (the domain and the target) We can call an object by the name of another because we make a comparison between them and find some common features in terms of shape, position, movement, function, colour, and size In many cases we can liken something to something else on certain grounds This is the association of similarity In daily life, metaphor is considered as hidden comparison, i.e there is no formal element of comparison

Metonymy, on the orther hand, bases on the contiguity of notions This is the main subject

of this study, so that we do not discuss in details in this part All the related matters are left

to the next two chapters

Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement not meant to be understood literally Hyperbole’s effect is really powerful in our communication Talking about a bad situation someone has experienced, people can say: “It’s a nightmare” “A thousands thanks” is used to express your appreciation to someone’s help

Irony is the term which is taken from rhetoric to express meaning by words of opposite sense Here, it is important to note that intonation has a very essential role to play in getting this message across For example, if someone say to you that “You’ve got us into a nice mess?”, you must bare in mind that “nice” does not actually mean “good” any more but “bad”

Other types of transference of meaning involving litotes, expressing something in the affirmative by the negative of its contrary, and euphemisms, expressing something unpleasant by a milder expression

Sometimes we may find an overlap between the uses of these means of semantic transference That refers to the situation when one word is used with their new meaning,

the under-relation can be analysed from different views or angles The vivid example for this can be found in the comparison between metonymy and metaphor in the next chapter Overall, language in general and its components like word meaning in particular is changing day by day because of both linguistic and extra linguistic causes and with the help of many powerful means In the next chapters we will discuss in detail one of the most basic means of transference of meaning called Metonymy

The term metonymy, as defined by Nguyen Hoa, is the transference of meaning from one object to another based on contiguity of notions, i.e instead of the name of one object or notion we use the name of another because these objects are associated and closely related:

“the kettle boils” instead of “the water in the kettle boils”, “crown” instead of “monarchy” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, metonymy is defined from two different perspectives In rhetoric, metonymy is the substitution of one word for another word with which it is associated In cognitive linguistics, metonymy refers to the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity and is one of the basic characteristics of cognition It is common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect

of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it

A few commonly used examples of metonymy are:

According to Galperin I.R., metonymy is based on a different type of relation between the dictionary and contextual meanings, a relation based not on identification, but on some kind of association connecting the two concepts which these meanings represent

According to Sosnovskaya V.B., units of poetic speech called metonymy are also based upon analogy But in them there is an objectively existing relationship between the object named and the object implied

According to Kukharenko V.A., metonymy also becomes instrumental in enriching the vocabulary of the language and it is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects or phenomena

So, according to those definitions, we can say that metonymy is a transference of meaning based on a logical or physical connection between things In metonymy a thing is described by its action, its function or by some significant features It is one of the means

of forming the new meanings of words in the language

It is our familiarity with metonymy that makes He drank the whole bottle easy to understand, although it sounds absurd literally (i.e he drank the liquid, not the glass object) We also accept The Whitehouse announced or Downing Street protested without being puzzled that buildings appear to be talking We use metonymy when you talk about filling up the car, having a roof over our head, answering the door, or needing some wheels If you see a mail delivery company called Spokes, you know, via metonymy, how they are making those deliveries (i.e by bicycle)

Many examples of metonymy are highly conventionalized and easy to interpret However, many others depend on an ability to infer what the speaker has in mind The metonymy in Get your butt over here is easier to understand if you are used to male talk in the United States, the string are too quite if you are familiar with orchestral music, and I prefer cable,

if you have a choice in how you receive television programs (in the USA) Making sense

of such expressions often depends on context, background knowledge and inference

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In order to have deep understanding of metonymy, it is really important to make good distinction between metonymy and metaphor which are two basic means of transference of meaning

Metaphor and metonymy are both figures of speech where one word may be used in place

of another However, especially in cognitive science and linguistics, the two figures of

speech work very differently Roman Jakobson (2002) argued that they represent two fundamentally different ways of processing language

Metonymy works by the contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas metaphor works by the similarity between them When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with metaphor: there is nothing crown-like about the king, press-like about reporters or plate-like about an entrée Two examples using the term “fishing” help make the distinction clear (example drawn from Dirven, 1996) The phrase “to fish pearls” uses metonymy, drawing from “fishing” the idea of taking things from the ocean What is carried across from “fishing fish” to

“fishing pearls” is the domain of usage and the associations with the ocean and boats, but

we understand the phrase in spite of rather than because of the literal meaning of fishing:

we know you do not use a fishing rod or net to get pearls and we know that pearls are not, and do not originate from, fish

In contrast, the metaphorical phrase “fishing for information”, transfer the concept of fishing into a new domain If someone is “fishing” for information, we do not imagine that they are anywhere near the ocean, rather we transfer elements of the action of fishing (waiting, hoping to catch something that cannot be seen) into a new domain (a conversation) Thus, metonymy works by calling up a domain of usage and an array of associations (in the example above, boats, the ocean, gathering life from the sea) whereas metaphor picks a target set of meanings and transfers them to a new domain of usage

To sum up, we can look at the table below:

A phrase that is silently related to the

concept is substituted for the concept

However, metaphor and metonymy can both be at work in the same figure of speech

sometimes, or one could interpret a phrase metaphorically or metonymically For example,

the phrase “lend me your ear,” could be analysed in a number of ways We could imagine the following interpretations:

Metonymy only: Firstly we can analyse “ear” metonymically which means “attention” (because we use ears to pay attention to someone’s speech) Now when we hear the phrase

“lending ear (attention)”, we stretch the base meaning of “lend” (to let someone borrow an object) to include the “lending” of non-material things (attention)

Metaphor only: Imagine the whole phrase literally – the speaker now has a collection of the listeners’ ears at his disposal If he were to have such a collection, the listeners could not help but listen to what the speaker has to say We then analyse this complete image metaphorically to mean that the speaker wants the listeners to pay attention

Metaphor and metonymy: First, analyse the verb phrase “lend me your ear” metaphorically

to mean “turn your ear in my direction,” since we know that literally lending a body is nonsensical Then, analyse the motion of ears metonymically – we associate “turning ears” with “paying attention”, which is what the speaker wants the listeners to do

It is difficult to say which of the above analyses most closely represents the way a listener interprets the expression, and it is possible that the phrases is analysed in different ways by different listeners, or even by one and the same listener at different times Regardless, all three analyses yield the same interpretation; thus, metaphor and metonymy, though quite different in their mechanism, can work together seamlessly

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According to Alexey, A L in his article “The metonymic way of an attributive description

http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/04_09/lukyanov15.htm, there are three types of metonymy 2.3.1 Direct, or primary, metonymy

Direct metonymy is the direct transference of the meaning to the object on the basis of association with the subject itself For example:

"We could hear the cheery clatter of our knives, the laughing voices " [J.K Jerome]

In this case, the participle "laughing" that characterizes the subject expressed in this sentence by the pronoun "we" is used with the noun "voices", although no voice can laugh

by itself, it is the property of a human being The description is transferred from the subject itself to its part, so it is obvious that this sentence is an example of primary metonymy

An interesting example of primary metonymy is its usage in such a cultural phenomenon as wishes By saying to each other "Happy New Year!" or "Merry Christmas!", people in reality explicate the thought "I wish you to be happy in the new year" or "I wish you to be merry on Christmas" The usage of direct metonymy is quite obvious in cases like these 2.3.2 Indirect, or secondary, metonymy

This type of metonymy is the double transference of the meaning to another object on the basis of association with the manner of action of the subject mediated by the subject itself For example:

"Poirot waved an impatient hand." [A Christie]

Here is the analogous transference of the meaning from the manner of action of the subject (waved impatiently) to the object (hand), mediated by the subject (Poirot), because it is not the hand that is impatient, but Poirot himself waves it impatiently

2.3.3 Partial metonymy

Differently from the two first types, this type of metonymy employs the use of an attribute which acquires a certain degree of associativeness with the subject For example:

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" [W Blake]

In this fragment, the usage of metonymy can be observed in the nouns "hand" and "eye" The attribute "immortal" characterizing the subject of this transference (obviously "God") does not bear in itself the pronounced metonymic complexion, but has only a shade of the associative transference As a matter of fact, the attribute "immortal" only adds to

nominative metonymy in the words "hand" and "eye", and therefore cannot by itself be regarded as complete and self-sufficient metonymy

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The relationship between words are based simply on a close connection in everyday experience That close connection can be based on a container – contents relation (bottle – coke; can – juice), a whole – part relation (car – wheels; house – roof) or a representative – symbol relationship (King – crown; the President – the White House) We will look at some cases of metonymy as follows

2.4.1 Name of container to refer to the thing contained

Examples:

The kettle is boiling (1)

He drank the whole cup (2)

It is obvious that the “kettle” can not boil as well as the man can not swallow the “cup” Therefore, questions can be raised here: “What is boiling?” and “What did he actually drink?” It is not the kettle but water in that kettle is boiling The case is nearly the same when we look at the second example and find that in fact the man drank some beer or water or juice in the cup not the cup itself In other words, the words “kettle” and “cup” in these examples are used to refer to other things, which are contained in those kinds of containers

The table below shows how these words carry different meanings in original use and Metonymic sense

1 kettle a container with a lid, handle and a spout, used for boiling water water boiled in

the kettle

2 cup container shaped like a bowl, usually with a handle, used for

drinking tea, coffee, etc.:

water/beer/etc in the cup

2.4.2 Names of parts of human body used as symbols

Human beings in the process of using language firstly got to know about their own body