Metonymy

10 Key excerpts on "Metonymy"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics

  • Jeannette Littlemore, John R. Taylor, Jeannette Littlemore, John R. Taylor(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Since metaphor had been the focus of attention for almost 20 years, it was only natural that the initial debate on Metonymy was centred on setting up the dividing line between metaphor and Metonymy and discussing their degree of centrality in language and thought. Subsidiary topics were the metonymic grounding of metaphor, the interaction between metaphor and Metonymy and the role of Metonymy (often vs metaphor) in semantic change and lexical polysemy, in language-based inferential activity, and in grammar. More recent topics of study include the connections between Metonymy and construal phenomena such as zone activation and facetization (Geeraerts and Peirsman, 2011; Paradis, 2004), the usefulness of Metonymy in discourse (Barcelona, 2005, 2011) and the existence of metonymic complexes (Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez, 2011). In the present contribution, we will centre our discussion of Metonymy on the related definitional and demarcation issues, the interactional problem and the role of Metonymy in grammar and in deriving pragmatic inferences. As we will see, settling the controversies around these topics is essential in order to understand the nature of Metonymy and its crucial role in language and thought.

  2 Defining Metonymy How to define Metonymy is still a matter of controversy in Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Benczes et al., 2011). There are, however, three basic positions, which we will show to be compatible.

  On one view, Metonymy is, like metaphor, a conceptual mapping, that is one or more correspondences between conceptual domains or elements of a domain, where by ‘conceptual domain’ we understand an internally coherent knowledge construct or ‘any kind of conception or realm of experience’ (Langacker, 2008: 44), which is the equivalent of what Fillmore refers to as a ‘frame’ (cf. Fillmore, 1982; Taylor, 1995: 83–7). However, Metonymy differs from metaphor in two significant ways. First, Metonymy happens within the boundaries of a single conceptual domain, while metaphor is a mapping across discrete conceptual domains. Second, Metonymy involves a ‘stands for’ relationship between related parts of a conceptual domain, or between the whole domain and one of its parts, or between part of a domain and the whole of it. By contrast, metaphor is based on an ‘is a’ relationship where one conceptual domain allows us to think and reason about another conceptual domain. This is the original position taken by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff and Turner (1989). For example, in the metaphor CHANGE IS GETTING/LOSING A POSSESSION, acquiring or losing a property is seen as getting or losing a possession, regaining a property is regaining a possession and purposes are desired possessions. This conceptual system underlies expressions such as I keep getting these terrible headaches; He has lost his mind ; She regained her strength ; He’d like to have some more courage . Metonymy is not used for such reasoning purposes. Instead, it serves a referential function. For example, in the sentence The guitar has been drinking heavily

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  eBook - ePub

  Cognitive Linguistics - Foundations of Language

  • Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak, Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Despite the universal agreement within CL on the conceptual nature of Metonymy, not all the other properties of Metonymy suggested by the initial proponents of the cognitive theory of Metonymy, namely Lakoff and Johnson (1980: Chapter 8) and Lakoff and Turner (1989: 100−108) have been accepted by all cognitive linguists. Metonymy is characterized by these scholars as a process occurring within the same domain, whereby one conceptual entity, the source, “stands for” and is projected (“mapped”), with a primarily referential purpose, onto another conceptual entity, the target. This is what could be called the “initial cognitive definition of Metonymy” (ICD). The ICD includes both uncontroversial and controversial additional properties of Metonymy.

  Among the uncontroversial properties we find these:

  • − Metonymy involves two conceptual entities which are closely associated in experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 35); that is, Metonymy is experientially grounded and it involves elements which are experientially (hence conceptually) contiguous (unlike metaphor). In (1)–(3) above the Metonymy involves entities which are conceptually contiguous, like people and their body parts, locations and people or institutions located in them, or houses and their relevant parts.
  • − Metonymy often provides a conceptual perspective on the target, as in We have some good heads for the project , where good heads is used to refer to a group of people who are conceptualized in terms of their intelligence (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 74). This property is implicit in the above definition, since the projection of the source (head as the seat of intelligence in the example) imposes a perspective on the target (people) ( see Barcelona 2011a : 13−14).

  All the other properties included in the ICD, which were at first accepted by many cognitive linguists (including myself), are either decidedly controversial or in need of further clarification:

  • − Referentiality. Some cognitive linguists seem to consider Metonymy to be necessarily a referential device (the metonymies in (2) and (3) are referential, since they operate in referential noun phrases), while most others also recognize the existence of non-referential metonymies, like that in (1), which operates in a predicational, i.e., non-referential, noun phrase. The pioneers of the cognitive theory of Metonymy, Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 74), however, had simply suggested that Metonymy had a primarily

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  Semiotics and City Poetics

  Jakobson's Theory and Praxis

  • Mary Coghill(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Roman Jakobson and Metonymy: Linguistics and semiotics This is the first of two chapters dedicated to the study of Metonymy. In this chapter the emphasis is on the origins of the term and whether linguistics can provide a full interpretation of it. Jakobson’s Formalist definition of the term provides further complexity – or indeed, perhaps, simplicity. Metonymy, especially in poetry, is one of the lesser studied tropes. This is a trope which functions through substitution. The roles of Metonymy in both poetry and prose are explored. The other three major tropes are metaphor, synecdoche and irony (NPEPP. 1993. 1261a). Tropes can also be classified as having various more specific characteristics. Following Jakobson, others state that there are only two tropes – metaphor and Metonymy, where synecdoche is an aspect of Metonymy (NPEPP. 1993.1261a). What is a trope? It was used originally to describe certain forms of cadence or embellishment in church music. More generally, within literary criticism, it is: “a figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it; also, in casual use, a figure of speech; figurative language” (OED 1968: 2252c). With regard to poetry, does Metonymy form an appropriate poetic trope? Jakobson himself ascribed it to prose rather than to poetry. It is, however, hard to find a clear definition of Metonymy. The word is from the Greek and means “change of name”. It is, as stated in the NPEPP : “A figure in which one word is substituted for another on the basis of some material, causal, or conceptual relation” (1993: 783b). The fundamental characteristic of the metonym is that of substitution. “A proper term is substituted for another for the sake of ornament” (Cicero: “De Oratore 3.42”.167/8)

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  eBook - ePub

  The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

  Fourth Edition

  • Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The reliance of Metonymy on reference to experience may account for the difficulty theorists have in defining it. To say that it depends on contiguity or the transfer of features in a single domain, scheme, or model is to admit metaphorically that it cannot be delimited. Traditional sources list 23 types of Metonymy (Peirsman and Geeraerts); Radden and Kövecses identify 49. The inadequacy of referential, pragmatic, and semantic definitions has led to an analysis of tropes based on the mental operations underlying their ling. expression. For conceptual-metaphor theorists, metonymical connections between physical reality and ideas support the thesis that lang. emerged from bodily experience. Physical warmth, a red face, and high blood pressure generate metonymies related to anger; hand, heart, and head signify action, feeling, and thought. In cognitive linguistics, one finds simple verbal patterns explained as intricate configurations of Metonymy. “I can see your point” becomes a Metonymy for “I see your point” (potential for actual). Corporations become metonymic wholes, parts of which (company, executives, workers) are activated in different statements. Metonymy gives actions and actors the names of objects (a ski; to ski; skier). The complexity of this view, inadequately represented here, becomes apparent in the anthols. listed in the bibl. The discussion of Metonymy produced by cognitive linguists and conceptual-metaphor theorists dwarfs that of the preceding two millennia. The objects of analysis are commonplace expressions that may make us aware of verbal intricacies but not of interesting variations. Poetry shares with everyday conversation a creative production of Metonymy that sometimes attracts scholarly attention (Nerlich and Clarke).

  Those who seek a logic underlying Metonymy and other tropes are forced to redefine them, shifting some traditional meanings to other tropes and positing new conceptual entities that include the features that remain. In so doing, they often seek an explanation of tropes as rule-governed transformations of a posited conceptual literalism. The theoretical clarity thus obtained results from attempting to make the terminology of rhet. and poetics useful for philosophy, ling., and cognitive science.

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  Metonymy and Language

  A New Theory of Linguistic Processing

  • Charles Denroche(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Taxonomies can also distract us from questions of more consequence, such as attempting to understand the mechanism and motivation behind Metonymy—the main concern of this work. For the present study, the problem is not so much classifying metonymies into types but making a distinction between conventional and novel use. Most of the discussions in the literature concern ready-made signs, that is, words, compounds or phrases which are already part of the corpus of a language. While these are certainly of great interest in revealing metonymic processes which have occurred in the past, they tell us little about the mental process in communication. As Gibbs observes, “People may […] comprehend conventional metonymic language without necessarily drawing metonymic mappings” (Gibbs 1999:74). A similar observation was made regarding metaphor in Chapter 3, which led to identifying Metonymy as the mechanism behind active metaphorization. Conclusion This chapter has developed a General Theory of Metonymy. I have shown that the ability to recognize relatedness has a wide reach, playing an important role in conceptualization, in the language system and in face-to-face interaction using language. Metonymy is important in defining categories, in pragmatic inferencing and in realizing literal and metaphoric meaning, as well as metonymic meaning. I have developed a more precise ontology of Metonymy in this chapter by exploring domain theory, the metaphor-Metonymy continuum and typologies of Metonymy. In the next chapter, I look at the role played by the active use of metonymic mapping in communication and the strikingly conspicuous role Metonymy plays in various cultural and social activities, which seem to have no purpose other than to fulfil a ludic or recreational function, a sense of play and enjoyment in Metonymy for its own sake.

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  eBook - ePub

  The Patterns of Symbolic Communication

  • Sui Yan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Clearly, the selection of different correlates determines the different metonymies and those different metonymies are bound to create different “facts” or the so-called mythologies. If a Metonymy consists of the practice of choosing a part to represent the whole, it would make a world of difference depending on whether we choose the romantic and beautiful Avenue des Champs-Elysées or the notoriously messy and disorderly Paravilla Street to represent Paris. This is exactly the secret that makes Metonymy so fascinating. However, if a Metonymy consists of the practice of choosing one relevant item to represent another, choosing a heap of bank notes to represent the life of a prostitute would be as valid an indication of our attitude toward that prostitute as choosing a shabby clinic of sexual diseases. No matter which mode we choose to construct a Metonymy – either using the part to stand for the whole, or exploiting the correlation between two diverse categories of phenomena, Metonymy is a way whereby we understand and explicate the world. In doing so, we take advantage of the relationship inherent in the physical phenomena of our world that signs refer to, and this relationship is essentially the logical extension between the referents of signs.

  In conclusion, just as many economic phenomena could only be understood from the political perspective and, vice versa, many political issues can only be understood from the economic perspective, the nature of metaphor and Metonymy, so disputatious in rhetoric, can be easily disclosed when we subject them to a semiotic investigation.

  4.4 Metaphor and Metonymy: mechanisms of human cognition

  Both metaphor and Metonymy belong to the realm of discourse strategy. Living in this beautiful world, we have become extremely thoughtful and emotional. We have too many people to please, too many things to describe, too many ideas to express, and too many tricks to peddle. Obviously, our vocabulary is too insufficient to help fulfill those tasks. The alarming traffic congestions on the highways of vocabulary often prevent us from effectively expressing our thoughts and feelings that keep gushing forth. Hence, our expressions are often rendered incoherent, ambiguous, and unintelligible. This forces us to contrive ways to load our limited number of words with as many meanings as possible so that we can maximize the expression of our rich feelings and thoughts. In the process, we have discovered metaphor and Metonymy as two mechanisms to extend the meanings of our words. Language, as a set of conventions, is static and constant, but discourse, as the application of language, is forever dynamic, inspired, and open, doing the best it can to describe and represent the world adequately. This has become possible because of the crucial role played by metaphor and Metonymy. Thus, it can be safely concluded that metaphor and Metonymy not only serve as two rhetorical devices but, more importantly, as two vital vehicles of human cognition and expression.

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

  • James Simpson, James Simpson(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To readers of this Handbook of Applied Linguistics, it may be of particular interest that conceptual metaphor theory has spawned a huge number of applications on a wide range of registers, among them advertising, political, media, medical, religious and sports discourse (cf., for example, Cameron and Deignan 2006 ; Lakoff 2004 ; Musolff 2006 ; Nerlich 2010). As a further recent development, metaphor theorists have begun to search for methods of identifying metaphors in large corpora in a more or less automatic way (cf. Charteris-Black 2004 ; Deignan 2005 ; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2007). Although Lakoff and Johnson did mention Metonymy in Metaphors We Live By as a second basic type of figurative language, which is based on contiguity rather than similarity, it was not until much later that cognitive linguists started to see the fundamental role of this linguistic phenomenon for conceptualization. Triggered to a large extent by an important paper by Zoltan Kövecses and Günter Radden (1998) and the volume edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden soon afterwards (1999), linguistic effects of metonymic conceptualizations such as part for whole, cause for effect or agent for action have been found in many areas of language. For example, the conversion of tutor from noun to verb illustrated in example 23 can be interpreted as being cognitively motivated by the conceptual Metonymy agent for action. In the field of pragmatics, the functioning of indirect speech acts such as example 24 has been explained with recourse to the Metonymy ability for action (Panther and Thornburg 1999). That Metonymy is a highly productive process in the lexicon creating new meanings for existing lexemes (cf. example 25) is of course hardly a new insight, but has thus been placed in a wider cognitive context: She has tutored many students. [agent for action] Can you step aside, pease

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  eBook - ePub

  Cognitive Linguistics and Religious Language

  An Introduction

  • Peter Richardson, Charles M. Mueller, Stephen Pihlaja(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  kneeling for praying . These are examples of Metonymy, defined as drawing on one aspect of a domain to say something about another closely related aspect of the same domain (Littlemore, 2015; Nerlich, 2006).

  4.1 Identifying Metonymy

  At first glance, offering a coherent definition of Metonymy and marking it out as something qualitatively different from metaphor seems simple. However, when dealing with multiple real-world examples, it soon becomes apparent that there is often a fuzzy boundary between metaphor and Metonymy. Biernacka’s (2013) adaptation of the MIP to Metonymy focuses the analyst’s attention on distinguishing characteristics. The procedure has been reproduced below:

  1. Read the entire text to get a general understanding of the overall meaning.

  2. Determine the lexical units.

  3. Decide on the metonymicity of each lexical unit:

  a. For each lexical unit establish its contextual meaning – taking into account how it applies to an entity in the situation evoked by the text, as well as co-text (i.e. the surrounding text; what is said before and after the examined expression). Take co-text into account.

  b. For each lexical unit determine if it has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the meaning in the given context.

  c. If the lexical unit has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the given context, and the contextual and basic meanings are different, determine if they are connected by contiguity, defined as a relation of adjacency and closeness comprising not only spatial contact but also temporal proximity, causal relations and part whole relations.

  4. If a connection is found in step 3c that is one of contiguity: check backwards and forwards to determine if any other lexical unit(s) belong(s) together semantically, thus determining the extent of the Metonymy vehicle; and mark the lexical unit (or lexical units which belong together) as [a]‌ Metonymy vehicle.

  (Biernacka, 2013, p. 117)

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  eBook - ePub

  Diccionario Bilingüe de Metáforas y Metonimias Científico-Técnicas

  Ingeniería, Arquitectura y Ciencias de la Actividad Física

  • Georgina Cuadrado-Esclapez, Irina Argüelles Álvarez, Maria Pilar Duran Escribano, Maria José Gomez Ortiz, Silvia Molina Plaza, Joana Pierce McMahon, Maria-Mar Robisco-Martín, Ana Roldán-Riejos, Paloma Úbeda-Mansilla(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Thus, when we use the metaphoric expressions hierro activo (“active iron”) or hierro inactivo (“inactive or passivified iron”) in metallurgy, we are mapping the organic quality of activity upon steel, an inanimate object. In other words, we could, at this stage, claim that scientific language includes subjective and imaginative features in a similar way to the mapping of general language [6]. Metonymy is another pervasive cognitive mechanism in technical language that occurs when one semantic part or feature of an entity serves to name a whole mapping [7]. It is different from metaphor in that the meaning transfer occurs within the same domain thus giving rise to associations that can be mainly cause–effect or part–whole. An example to illustrate this is “touchdown”, which in aeronautical engineering is metonymic because it means the entire landing action of an aircraft, not only a part, implying thus a part–whole relation. Likewise, in aeronautical engineering, “target recognition” compresses a metonymic cause–effect relation as it refers to a process (recognizing) that may lead to some action on a subsequent target. In a nutshell, metaphor stands for the interrelation of various semantic domains by means of similarity, contrast or comparison, imaginatively creating new analogies, whereas Metonymy engages a semantic part or feature of the source domain. In this work, we have found that metaphor and Metonymy use in technical language is not consistent or operates in various scientific or technical fields consistently. Equally, conceptual or linguistic metaphoric correspondences are not equivalent in English and Spanish. Yet, metaphor identification can structure and bring systematicity to vocabulary study in any language

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  The Metaphor Compass

  Directions for Metaphor Research in Language, Cognition, Communication, and Creativity

  • Marianna Bolognesi, Ana Werkmann Horvat(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What is transferred, or carried through, within a metaphor, is meaning. Metaphors are ways to convey meaning. Because all words are ways to convey meaning, it should be specified how metaphoric ways to convey meaning differ from non-metaphoric ways. This is a hot topic of discussion among researchers. Theoretical views on this issue range between two very extreme positions, which can be summarized as follows: on one hand, it could be argued that every use of language is metaphoric, because words stand for the meaning that they convey, thanks to relations that are strongly characterized by arbitrariness. In this perspective, when we use the word cat in a conversation to name an actual cat, we hope to evoke in our listeners’ minds a mental representation of the meaning of cat, which is not an actual cat, but rather something that stands for an actual cat. In this sense, one may argue that all language use is based on metaphors, in the sense that all words trigger representations that stand for something out there, in the real world. This position is slightly problematic, because it seems to muddy the waters and prevent further investigation, by equating every type of language use to a metaphor. On the opposite extreme of the spectrum, one could expect to find the position in which nothing is a metaphor, and all language use is literal. To the best of our knowledge, such an extreme position has not been defended by any contemporary scholar. Nevertheless, there are theoretical accounts that emphasize the lexical, morphosyntactic, and semantic mechanisms of meaning construction, without addressing the specific phenomenon of metaphoricity directly. For instance, in Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) metaphor is typically classified as a case of loose language use (on a continuum with approximations, category extensions, and hyperboles)

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