The Role of Conceptual Metonymy and ICM in the Creation of Noun-Noun Compounds
Shi Ye-li · Journal of Zhejiang Ocean University · 2011
Noun-noun compounds are a highly intriguing set of linguistic phenomenon.Conceptual metonymy,as the most basic part in the process of cognition,plays a critical role in producing this type of compounds.Conceptual metonymy-activating endocentric compounds have much clearer semantic meanings while metonymy-activating exocentric compounds are generally regarded as semantically opaque with no analyzability or regular word-formation patterns.This paper,with conceptual metonymy theory and ICM as its theoretical support,based on the analysis of five categories of metonymy-based noun-noun compounds,verifies that the latter ones are also combined with regularity and systematicity,and thus are analyzable and interpretable.