Abstract
Panther and Thornburg (1999) exam the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY in English and Hungarian with the idea of the scenario approach to speech act metonymy. They observe that this metonymy is systematically exploited in both languages though there are some limitations in Hungarian. Based on the idea of Panther and Thornburg (1999), this paper exams the same metonymy in Chinese (Mandarin) and English. The result shows that Chinese also fully exploits the metonymy in seven domains, including sense perception domain, mental state/process domain, hedged performative domain, indirect speech domain, actions domain, character dispositions domain and acquired skills domain. The prevalent use of the metonymy in Chinese confirms the idea that the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy is universal, though it violates the cognitive principle ACTUALITY OVER POTENTIALITY.
Published Version
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