A Contrastive Study of the Functions of Metonymy and Metaphor: From the Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor and metonymy are not only figures of speech but also common modes of thinking.These two important phenomena share some fundamental differences as well as similarities in terms of their rhetoric,cognitive,semantic and social functions.Metaphor involves things from two different domains and its creation is based on association by similarity.As metonymy uses a special property of something or the thing's special relationship with other things to denote the thing,its major function is to help a hearer recognize the referent and its special characteristics.