Poetic Metonymy—Humanization in Cries in the Drizzle and Its English

Abstract

Cries in the Drizzle [1]is a masterpiece of Yu Hua's novels. The success of Cries in the Drizzle lies in its use of cognitive metonymy. Yu Hua constructs unusual collocations with "Adj + N" constructions involving metonymy, such as "stupid slobber" and "clever smile" which abound in Cries in the Drizzle, so that the characters and plot in the novel are vivid and touching. The term "metonymic humanization" first appears in Zhang (2015)[2] modeling on psych "Adj + N" constructions, such as "a small reluctant hand". In the elaboration of this concept, Zhang (2023) [3] proposes that the vivid and touching description in a novel often emerges from embodiment of visual and auditory perceptions in metonymic humanization. According to Zhang, metonymic humanization shares the same mechanism with metonymy. Therefore, it is worthy of taking metonymic humanization approach to the analysis of literary texts. This study examines the unusual collocations with "Adj + N" constructions in Yu Hua's Cries in the Drizzle from the perspective of cognitive poetics, focusing on the mechanism of metonymic humanization. The findings of this study indicate that cognitive metonymy is an effective approach to literary texts and metonymic humanization is an effective way to analysis of unusual collocations in literary texts. And finally in the hope of revealing the hypothesis Zhang (2023) [3] proposed that both Chinese and English should be metonymic.