Mataphorical Extension and Lexical Meaning

MATAPHORICAL EXTENSION AND LEXICAL MEANING Lily 1-wen Su and Laura Hsiu-min Liu Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan jwensu@ccros.ntu.edu.tw, r4142001@ms.cc.ntu.eduhtw ABSTRACT Metonymy and metaphor reflect an important part of the way people ordinarily conceptualize of themselves, events, and everyday world [1]. We will argue for this position via the lexicalization process of two linguistic items in Chinese: shang and zai, and demonstrate that grammatical meaning develops from lexical meaning by a process of "generalization or weakening of semantic content," which is in fact metaphorical in nature. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain into the nature of metaphorical extension (via metaphor and metonymy) and the creation of lexical meaning as they are seen in the two lexical items mentioned. Though data gathered from corpus, dictionaries and native speaker intuition, we wish to examine the relationship between conversion, metaphor and metonymy, and understand better 1) the driving force for polysemy in Chinese lexicon; 2) the different driving forces, concerning metaphor and metonymy, for prototypical categories and grammaticalization. 1. Introduction The term "metaphor" has been used with a variety of senses, which accounts for many of the controversies and misunderstandings surrounding this term. For example, "metaphor" is employed on the one hand as a genetic term for any figure of speech which includes figures such as metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, etc. On the other hand, there are more narrow definitions, according to which metaphor contrasts with alternative figures such as metonymy. One of the most influential linguistic treatments of metaphor and metonymy as distinct, mutually exclusive types of expression is that of Jakobson and Halle [2], who describe the dichotomy between these two kinds of tropes as reflecting a "bipolar structure of language" that appears to be of "primal significance and consequence for all verbal behavior and for human behavior in general". They claim that, according to the metaphorical way, one topic leads to another through their similarity, whereas according to the metonymic way, discourse is developed along the lines of topic contiguity. The focus of this paper will be on a different perspective of the relation between metaphor and metonymy. We maintain that the more common paradigm to be observed in human language appears to be one where the two are not mutually exclusive but rather complement one another. As observed in Goossens [3], two main patterns are said to be associated with the ways in which metaphor and metonymy interact: 1) Metonymy functions within a metaphor; and 2) Metaphor and metonymy coexist in some uses of a figurative expression. We agree with Goossens in that although metonymy and metaphor are "clearly distinct in principle, they are not always separable in practice." This is especially true with the conceptualization of grammatical structures. We will adhere to Goossens' view and apply it to the processes known as grammaticalization, -63- which is believed to be metaphorically structured [4]. Grammaticalization in our study is considered as a subtype of metaphor, which can be defined as "a metaphorical shift toward the abstract" …

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