tailieunhanh - The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 29

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 29. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 250 klaus-uwe panther and linda l. thornburg . Some Discourse-Pragmatic Functions of Metonymy So far little attention has been paid to the pragmatic function of metonymic shifts. Why would speakers use metonymies at all when they could just as well employ nonmetonymic means of referring predicating and performing illocutionary acts For the use of indirect speech acts sociopragmatic reasons such as politeness have been adduced . Brown and Levinson 1987 . In general a careful analysis of naturally occurring discourse data suggests that metonymic source and metonymic target are not pragmatically equivalent in all respects nor are metonymies with the same target but different sources mere stylistic variants of each other see section . Papafragou 1996 sees two communicative reasons for using metonymies i the extra processing effort caused by a metonymy is set off by a gain in contextual effects additional implicatures or ii the processing effort maybe smaller than that for a literal expression of the metonymic sense. The latter case occurs quite frequently in the setting of routinized communicative interaction such as at work in a restaurant where the waitresses do not know the names of customers it is common to refer to individuals or groups as for example table five. In the given context this is the most economical way to refer to otherwise unknown individuals. As an example of contextual gains consider the sentence Now it can happen uttered by Richard Williams father of the tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena Williams when they reached the final of the US Open tennis tournament in 2001. Why would the speaker choose the modal can in a situation where he knows that his daughters will be the finalists in the tennis tournament The reason may be that the source concept potentiality has in the given situation more contextual effects than the target concept future actuality . The greater cognitive effort resulting from the metonymic coding of the utterance is