Metonymy as a usage event
Introduction
The last two decades have seen a remarkable renewed interest in figures of speech, in particular, metaphor and metonymy. The interpretation of metaphor and metonymy has been a major concern in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and, of course, cognitive linguistics (see Gibbs 1994). In cognitive linguistics the focus of analysis has shifted from the stylistic and embellishing function of metaphor and metonymy in discourse to their role in human thinking and reasoning, and their impact on language structure and language use. The study of language use is of common interest to both pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. In the latter, the analysis of usage events, i.e. “actual utterances in their full phonetic detail and contextual understanding” (Langacker 2000: 2), has, in recent years, moved from a mere declaration of intention to a number of full-blown studies based on large corpora (for an overview see Geeraerts 2005). We do not present a corpus-based quantitative analysis of the function of metonymy in usage events, but carries out an in-depth conceptual and pragmatic analysis of a few illustrative examples that involve metonymic reasoning. My aim is to show that metonymic meanings provide generic prompts that are fleshed out on the basis of background knowledge (world knowledge), the situation of the utterance and the linguistic context (co-text) in which the metonymic expression occurs. My analysis proceeds from the local, i.e. intra-clausal context, in which the metonymic expression occurs, to the larger discourse and the extralinguistic context.
The method of analysis is thus complementary to that of large-scale corpus studies. There are some obvious drawbacks to my methodology– one being that any kind of generalization is highly risky. However, large-scale corpus-based studies also have their disadvantages: the higher the quantity of data to be covered by the analyst, the greater the danger that their conceptual and pragmatic analysis will be somewhat shallow and that important features of the data will be over looked.
More specifically, I will present my own view of metonymy as a figure of thought and language, and identify some typical properties of metonymy. I share a substantial set of assumptions with other researchers, but I also see some problems with the current use of key notions such as ‘domain’, ‘subdomain’, ‘single domain’, and ‘separate domains’, which figure prominently as criteria for distinguishing metaphor from metonymy. Rather than defining metaphor and metonymy in terms of the notions ‘separate domains’ and ‘single domain’, respectively– which need further clarification– I propose that the difference between metaphor and metonymy resides in the type of semiotic relation between their respective source and target. I contend that metaphor is an iconic relation and metonymy an indexical relation. This semiotic approach, in the spirit of C. S. Peirce, and more recently Masako Hiraga (1998, 2005) has the advantage that some properties of metonymy follow quite naturally from the premise that it is an indexical relation. I also argue that metonymy is a type of meaning elaboration, a term that comes close to, but is not identical with, what Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza calls ‘domain expansion’ (see e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Otal Campo 2002, Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Peña 2005). We also address some criticism that has been aimed against the approach to metonymy advocated by the present author and Linda L. Thornburg (Haser 2005).
Presents an in-depth analysis of two metonymies in written discourse. One is an instance of the well-known metonymic principle PLACE FOR EVENT AT PLACE, which provides a prompt that is further elaborated in the discourse context and/or through background knowledge. The second example involves a much richer metonymic (and also metaphoric) structure whose specific meaning is also fleshed out by the discourse context. We will summarize the results and discusses some questions for further research.
