From what has been presened about the potential difficulties that the Vietnamese learners of English in the foregoing section and about the similarities and differences of metonymic expressions in English and Vietnamese we would like to have the following suggestions.
First, to express the metonymy in English the Vietnamese learners of English can have much freedom in the language transfer by making use of the similarities in the mapping relations with ICMs. For the assumptions that English and Vietnamese have much in common in the ICMs as the universals both in the representation of the conceptual structures as well as the representation of these ICMs in language. In the two languages the learners can have at their disposal linguistic means to express the mapping relations between the entity in the source domain and entity in the target domain. Also, the ways the addressee’s attention to be directed to the desired target are similar in the two languages according to the principles of cognitive salience.
With these assumptions in mind, we suggest that this essential knowledge should be provided to the Vietnamese learners of English as far as the need of using metonymic expressions is concerned. With knowledge about the ICMs and the language resources to express the metonymy, learners of English can have more confidence to perform language transfer and apply some of the transfer patterns. For example
CONSTITUENTS Vietnamese English
PROPER NAME Rồi Hà Nội giàu lên rất nhanh Then, Hanoi was booming.
QUANTIFIER + N Cả nhà đã soi mình trong chiếc
gương đó The whole family has been looking
at themselves in that mirror.
Types of Source Target mapping Matrix
domain
Subdomain
Example
CENTRAL COMMITTEE FOR PERSON
Central committee
persons who serve in Central
committee
Đầm Môn vui như mở cờ trong bụng khi hay tin Trung ương cho tỉnh liên doanh với một công ty của nước ngoài mở xưởng đóng tàu tại đây
Đầm Môn is very happy when the Central Committee allows the province to do joint venture with a foreign company in building a shipping plant.
STATE FOR
PERSON State persons who serve in the State
Ít nhất họ cũng hy vọng Nhà nước mở đường cho dân ba xã vùng biển
At least they still hoped the State would have the roads built up for the three coastal village.
COURT FOR
PERSON the court persons who serve
in the court Tiền bán nửa căn hộ do toà án chia cho anh Đản là số tài sản duy nhất anh còn lại từ mười mấy năm xây dựng cái tổấm đã tan
The money inherited from half-apartment selling divided by the law-court was my brother Đản’s only fortune from his broken family during past ten years.
PRESS AND BROADCASTING CORPORATION
press and broadcasting croporation
persons who serve in the press and broadcasting corporation
Phía báo đài đang dòm ngó. Một bữa, họ ập vào, quay phim, chớp hình búa la xua
The press and radio television corporation is peering at us. One day, they rushed in and took photograph, and took snapshots …
Apart from the role in cognitive relations, metonymy fulfils mainly referential functions in communication. In a common case where metonymy is used referentially, the problem is how the hearer moves from what was said to an obvious related proposition which contained the intended referent. In Vietnamese literature, Nguyễn Tuân successfully has created metonymies in
his writing as well as in his short stories. Let have a look at the following sentence in his story. [37]
(134) Một cái miệng cười, mười ngón tay tháp bút trước kia là của chung thiên hạ, bởi vì nó không có sở cứ, bây giờ đã trở nên của riêng một
nhà. [37, p.102]
This is the value that is worth mentioning. Obviously, what is really being talked about here a beautiful girl. The metonymy in this sentence produced a rhetorical effect.
Consider the following example.
(135) Good! Wake up the whole country, and get the news through to the San Francisco police boat. [44, p.56]
It is clearly in (4) it was not “the whole country”, but all the people who living in the country. The metonymy “the whole country” is normally used to avoid a long paraphrase like “Good! Wake up all the people who living in the country, and get the news through to the San Francisco police boat” in order to achieve successful reference.
In Vietnamese, we have a similar case. Let have a look at the following sentence.
(136) Chuyến bay sẽ hạ cánh lúc hai giờ. Cậu có gì trở ngại không?.
[38 , p.103]
- The plane will arrive at 2 o’clock. Any questions?
In this case, it is not the plane can arrive by itself, but the pilot who will control the plane to land. The metonymy “chuyến bay” is also a way of avoiding the use of a longer, heavier to process