An investigation into Metonymy denoting humans In english and vietnamese poetry

Abstract

This study investigated into the syntactic and semantic features of metonymic expressions in English and Vietnamese Poetry. This is a descriptive study focusing on finding the diversity of metonymic expressions in both languages. Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, we looked into how English and Vietnamese made use of metonymic expressions in reference to the idealized conceptual models and principle of cognitive salience. We found that both English and Vietnamese poetry shared a lot of same types of metonymic expressions. We also found that English and Vietnamese share a lot of conceptual models in metonymic mapping concerning the use of metonymic expressions by different poets. Another point was the influence of cultural background knowledge on the way English and Vietnamese people conceptualize the world through metonymy. Basing on these findings, implications about syntactic and semantic features of metonymic expressions in English and Vietnamese have been proposed to the Vietnamese learners of English for the language transfer in interpreting and using metonymy.