engleski

On the regularity of metonymy (in medical discourse)

The topic of metonymy has cropped up in several recent articles, a welcome sign of growing interest in this phenomenon, which may eventually contribute towards shedding more light on the phenomenon of metonymic competence, paralleling metaphoric competence (Littlemore & Low 2006). However, in order to deal with this complex phenomenon one should be clear about the circumstances of the use of metonymy. Two issues pertaining to the use of metonymy that play a central role in Slabakova, Cabrelli Amaro & Kang (2013 & 2016) are mentioned in the very title of their study—novel metonymy and regular metonymy. In this presentation I draw attention to some problems with the assumption that these are opposites of each other and then examine what Slabakova, Cabrelli Amaro & Kang consider to be regular metonymy and demonstrate that while their novel metonymies are not really so different from the regular ones, and that there is another sense of metonymy regularity in cognitive linguistics, where metonymy seems to come closest it can to novelty. This phenomenon, referred to as regular metonymy, logical metonymy or logical polysemy, crosses boundaries of languages and cultures. This is illustrated on a set of examples from medical discourse from a number of languages (English, German, Spanish, Croatian, and Hungarian).

metonymy, health discourse, novel metonymy ; regular metonymy

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