On Metonymy and Its Translation

Abstract

The past decades has witnessed a revolutionary change of metaphor and metonymy from being figures of speech toconceptual systems. Metaphor’s status as a conceptual system has been widely recognized. However, metonymy hasreceived relatively less attention than metaphor, but its status as a cognitive instrument is no less important thanmetaphor at all. Metonymy is grounded in people’s experience, shaping people’s cognition and facilitating languageexpression. This paper is an attempt to explore the properties of metonymy from the perspective of rhetoric,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics and then to discuss translations of English metonymies. Translations canmanifest metonymy’s evolution and cultural difference. The ultimate purpose is to throw light on the metonymieswhich sometimes puzzle the English language learners so as to facilitate English language learning.