Research of Metonymy as a Prototypical Category

The definition of metonymy is typically known as semantic shifts within a domain or domain matrix;however,the existence of cross domains metonymic shifts challenges the typical definition of metonymy;Therefore,the present paper tries to examine metonymy as a prototypical category with part-whole contiguity in spatial domain as its core,and other metonymic patterns relate with it against three dimensions,namely strength of contact(going from part-whole containment over physical contact to adjacency without contact),boundedness(involving an extension of the part-whole relationship towards unbounded wholes and parts),and domain(with shifts from the spatial to the temporal,the spatio-temporal and the category domain),which is mainly based on the fruits of the researches conducted by Peirsman Geeraerts,and it will be done with the help of corpus collected from Chinese and English materials.