A study of metonymy in english and vietnamese newspapers

Abstract

The intention of this thesis is to go deeper into the notion of metonymy in cognitive linguistics. It focuses on finding the diversity of metonymical types used in English and Vietnamese newspapers of both languages and analysing semantic and syntactic features to discover their similarities and differences. On the basis of cognitive linguistics which make use of metonymy in the principle of idealized conceptual models we found that conceptual relation and idealized conceptual models make metonymic transfer and conceptual mapping affects the generation of metonymy in using language. With the findings in English and Vietnamese newspapers, semantic and syntactic features of metonymic espressions are partly proposed to contribute to better teaching and learning English as a foreign language, specifically the awareness of learners in using metonymic expressions for interpreting and writing newspaper effectively.