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Metonymy Goes Cognitive-Linguistic
Kurt Feyaerts and Geert Brône
Expressivity and Metonymic
Inferencing: Stylistic Variation in Nonliterary Language Use
Daniel C. Strack
Who Are the Bridge-Builders?
Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Architecture of Empire
Luigi Arata
The Definition of Metonymy
in Ancient Greece
Alice Deignan
A Corpus Linguistic
Perspective on the Relationship between Metonymy and Metaphor
To provide a context for the essays published here, this introduction to the special issue on metonymy highlights a number of aspects of the cognitive-linguistic discussion of metonymy of the past twenty-five years. It briefly sketches the development of metonymy studies in poetics, linguistics, and philosophy, emphasizing that the cognitive-linguistic approach to metonymy of the past decades represents a return to the semantic views of metonymy advocated in structuralist semantics. This development was triggered by the extensive study of metaphor, but metonymy has now emancipated itself as an autonomous field of study that displays complex and unresolved relations with metaphor. This introduction also attends to the new insights added by cognitive linguistics to such a semantic approach to metonymy, suggesting that metonymy has indeed gone cognitive linguistic.
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Kurt Feyaerts and Geert Brône, "Expressivity
and Metonymic Inferencing: Stylistic Variation in Nonliterary Language
Use" / 12
Metonymy has received renewed attention in recent cognitive linguistic
research as a prominent cognitive construal operation underlying many types
of everyday language use. However, the same conceptualization mechanism
is exploited for the realization of expressivity effects as well. The present
paper explores the way in which metonymy contributes to the creation of
an expressive meaning in different types of nonliterary language use. In
two case studies dealing with highly informal expressions (verbal insults
expressing stupidity) and more artificially construed language (newspaper
headlines), a structural pattern of stylistic variation is revealed, one
generated by the activation of a process of metonymic inferencing. In both
types of expressions, a careful equilibrium emerges between an innovative,
expressive meaning and well-established, conventional structures. This
observation is supports Giora's Optimal Innovation Hypothesis.
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Daniel C. Strack, "Who Are the Bridge-Builders?
Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Architecture of Empire" / 37
This essay examines Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Bridge-Builders,"
specifically focusing on how it uses bridge-building as a metaphorical
expression for imperialism. The typically positive connotations of bridges
must be reevaluated with reference to the narrative context of empire-building
and the individuals associated with it. Who are the bridge-builders? Analysis
of the story in light of the producer for product metonymy exposes the
problematic nature of bridge-building in the imperial context. From the
critic's perspective, analysis of the bridge-building metaphor reaffirms
Kipling's notorious role as propagandist for the imperialist cause while
examination of metonymy reveals another side of Kipling: his idealistic
vision for imperial reform. At the theoretical level, this examination
of the interplay between metaphor and metonymy demonstrates how a reader's
seemingly unprompted understanding of metaphor in narrative context may
actually be decisively shaped by subtle metonymic cues.
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Luigi Arata, "The Definition of Metonymy in
Ancient Greece" / 55
Metonymy is not one of the most studied figures of speech in ancient
Greek rhetoric and is defined by two different manualistic "traditions."
Analyzing them and considering the exemplifications of this trope that
were identified by Greek speculation leads us to some conclusions. First,
ancient manuals deal with metonymy to give reasons for some linguistic
phenomena, such as above all polysemy. On the one hand, for expository
clarity and ease of memorization, it is normal that in a manual there is
an accumulation of not particularly "brilliant" examples; on the other
hand, it is probable that the Greeks did not particularly love the pithiness
of an "excessive" use of metonymy. Second, as we can infer from the recurrent
use of the term metonymy in ancient commentators, we should also remember
the strange fact of describing in this way the causative use of some verbal
expressions that are commonly not causative at all.
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Alice Deignan, "A Corpus Linguistic Perspective
on the Relationship between Metonymy and Metaphor" / 72
Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that many metaphors have an experiential
basis that can be interpreted as metonymic. This has led to the current
widely held view that metonymy and metaphor overlap and interact with each
other, rather than being opposed, as previously believed. Writers such
as Louis Goossens have traced different ways in which the metonymic and
metaphorical mappings interact to result in complex linguistic expressions.
In this paper, corpus evidence is used to investigate such linguistic expressions
in order to trace the interactions of metaphor and metonymy that they realize.
Three groups of linguistic expressions are identified, each group realizing
a different type of mapping: one is metaphorical, and the other two are
different interactions of metonymy and metaphor. Concordances of the lexical
structures of the target domain are examined, and it is argued that the
different mappings result in different lexical patterns in their respective
target domains.
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