A social-cognitive research on metaphor and metonymy: Taking age appellations in Chinese as an example

Abstract

The process from individual language to communal language, from individual experience to communal embodiment, and from individual cognition to collective cognition is based on human embodiment and social interactions. Metaphor and metonymy are two basic cognitive approaches to the world. Thus, human cognition is metaphorical and metonymic in essence, and metaphonymy is embodied and social in nature. In the perspective of social embodied cognition, this paper, taking social metaphonymy as a theoretical foundation and the Chinese age appellations as the corpus, demonstrates that Chinese age appellation has eight metaphonymic categories, namely, physiology, gender, wisdom, accessories, raising, behavior, animal and plant, and number. The paper, by expounding the embodiment and metaphonymy, aims to reveal metaphonymic cognitive mechanism of Chinese age appellations.