A Research on the Extension of Lexical Meanings under the Perspective of Metonymic Mechanism
As one of the chief cognitive mechanisms,metonymy possesses the following important traits like contiguity,prominence and cognitive accessibility,etc,which provides the extension of lexical meanings with motivations.The lexical meanings usually include conceptual meanings,facets,as well as microsenses in which the former one is the existing meaning of the lexical items while the latter two are merely reflected in the contexts.Metonymy contributes to the meaning extension from the conceptual meanings respectively to the facets,microsenses,and other conceptual meanings.The illustration further proves that metonymy is essentially conceptual,and it is also viewed as one of the most fundamental processes of meaning extension.