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In the process of conversational inference, two kinds of cognitive mechanisms, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, play a pivotal role in activating the cognitive schemata in both the speaker and hearer, and thus, are conducive to the ease and speed of conversational inference thereby.

Conceptual Metaphor and Pragmatic Implication

Conceptual metaphor is generally understood as a conventional conceptual mapping from a source to a target domain. The source enables us to understand and reason about the target on account of the relevant aspects of its conceptual structures. Viz., through the conceptual link of the similarities shared between the two domains. For example,

1. A: How is my daughter at school?

B: Frankly speaking, she’s going nowhere that way.

In Sentence (1), the linguistic expression “that way” triggers off a scenario of Going on a journey, which consists of the activities of setting off, making progress, having a rest, getting lost, seeking help, and ultimately, reaching the destination and achieving one’s goal, or giving up halfway and without fulfilling one’s goal, etc. Meanwhile, the expression activates the one-to-many correspondence Life IS A JOURNEY metaphor that is based on the path schema. The hearer may derive the following possible candidates of implicatures:

2. a. The addressee is not going to achieve his expected goals (if he persists in the way he behaves).

b. The addressee is not going to making any progress in life.

c. The addressee may make progress if he changes his behavior timely. d. The addressee is acting in a wrong way.

e. The addressee may not have well-defined goals. f. The addressee has wrong goals.

g. Etc.

Among of all these candidates of implicatures, one of them might turn out to be more central than others. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue that the central correspondence in the journey metaphor is GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS. And this central correspondence allows the hearer to derive the central implicature, viz., (2a). “The addressee is not going to achieve his expected goals (if he persists in the way he behaves)”. Besides the central implicature, the other candidates are exploitations of remaining correspondences with their logic and structural relationships. (2b) focuses on the action; (2c) and (2d) on the manner of action; (2e) and (2f) on the type of goal. In different situations, some of these candidates may loom large as a result of the interaction of linguistic input, contextual factors and the mental processing.

Conceptual Metonymy and Pragmatic Implication

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 35) view metonymy as “using one entity to refer to another that is related to it”. They point out that metonymy “has primarily a referential function”, but “not merely a referential

device. It also serves the function of providing understanding” (Lakoff, & Johnson, 1980, p. 36). Gibbs assumes that “metonymy is a significant part of how people ordinarily think and speak”, and that “the Gricean notion of conversational implicature can be seen as being metonymically motivated” (1999, pp. 73-74). Lakoff and Turner (1987) redefine metonymy as “being primarily a cognitive process involving schematic mapping between two parts or aspects of the same conceptual domain.” Based on the notion of idealized cognitive model, Radden and Kovecses (1999, p. 21) give a generally-accepted definition of metonymy as “a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model”.

By integrating the theories of speech act scenario and metonymy, Panther and Thornburg (1997) propose the concept of speech act metonymy and classify it into the following types:

i. the BEFORE component for the whole scenario

the BEFORE component is the first stage of the whole scenario, which includes the motivation, potentiality, and ability, etc. that may activate the whole State of Affairs Scenario to happen.

ii. the CORE/RESULT component for the whole scenario

the CORE/RESULT component is the central stage of the whole scenario. The CORE describes the essential features of the action itself and RESULT refers to the immediate outcome after a successful performance of such action.

iii. the AFTER component for the whole scenario

the AFTER component depicts the intended consequences of the action that are not its immediate result.

Panther and Thornburg (1998, p. 761) assume that the more distant a speech act scenario component is from the CORE, the weaker its ability to evoke the whole scenario metonymically. To confirm this assumption, let us look at the following examples.

3. A: Will you open the window? B: Ok.

4. A: It’s so hot.

B: yuhh, I’ll have an air-conditioner fixed tomorrow. B’: Shall I open the window?

Both sentence (3) and (4) can be viewed as speech acts of request. However, the two sentences differ in their ability to evoke the speech act scenario of opening the window. In sentence (3), the speaker is asking whether the hearer has the motivation to perform the speech act. Thus, it belongs to the BEFORE component of the scenario, metonymically, this BEFORE component can be used to stand for the whole speech act scenario. As a result, it is easier for the hearer to infer the speaker’s intention to ask him to open the window. In sentence (4), the situation is a little different, the speaker’s utterance is not conventionally used to stand for a request, but only points to a request. Since the conceptual content of utterance (4A) is located outside the boundaries of the request scenario. Namely, it belongs to neither of the BEFORE, the CORE/RESULT, or the AFTER component, so consequently, no clear metonymic link can be established between the utterance and the speech act scenario of opening the window. However, with some conceptual effort, the utterance of (4A) could be interpreted as a motivation or reason for the hearer to perform the action, thus (4B´). These examples demonstrate that the hearers need to spend

different amounts of efforts to interpret these utterances as request. Thus, confirms Panther and Thornburg’s assumption that the more distant a speech act scenario component is from the CORE, the weaker its ability to evoke the whole scenario metonymically. Meanwhile, the analyses above illustrated how speech act metonymy works in conversational inference.

Conceptual metaphor differs from metaphor mainly in the fact that the former involves two discrete conceptual domains and a mapping across these domains whereas the latter involves a mapping within a single domain. But the two kinds of conceptual mapping usually interact and form a metaphor-metonymy continuum in conversational inferences.