The Role of Metonymy in Culinary Designation Constructions -A Case Study of Dish Names in Sichuan Cuisine
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Liu Haiou
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Existing studies on Chinese dish names have mainly focused on their translation strategies, cultural connotations, and pragmatic functions, while comparatively little attention has been paid to the cognitive mechanisms underlying the dish-name formation, such as metaphor and metonymy. Hence, the present study addresses this gap by examining dish names in Sichuan cuisine, one of China’s eight major culinary traditions, from the perspective of their fundamentally metonymic nature, based on a corpus drawn from TSTCTD. Focusing on two major constructional types, i.e., endocentric and exocentric constructions, it analyzes the metonymic cognitive mechanisms that motivate dish-naming practices, and classifies the typical metonymic patterns attested in the data. This study identifies eleven metonymic naming patterns as FLAVOR TYPICAL FOR MIXTURES OF FLAVORS, MATERIAL FOR PRODUCT, PROPERTY FOR INGREDIENT, PLACE FOR FLAVOR, PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT, COLOR TYPICAL OF A STATE FOR THE STATE, MANNER OF ACTION FOR THE RESUT OF THE ACTION, CONTAINER FOR THE CONTAINED, MATERIAL FOR FLAVOR, LOCAL CELEBRITY FOR PRODUCT and CULTURAL ICON FOR PRODUCT. These patterns demonstrate that the vehicles in Chinese dish-designation metonymy is predominantly grounded in concrete, experientially salient domains as well as in culturally specific, uniquely Chinese cognitive bases, often instantiated through historical allusions. This metonymic naming pattern reveals the philosophical paradigm of concrete, immanent thinking in Chinese philosophy.
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Authors
Liu Haiou
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