engleski

Now you see me, now you don’t: Metonymic mirages and myopia

This article is a plea for a balanced approach in metonymy research as its role in language is, ironically, both overplayed and undervalued at the same time. It is said that metonymy is ubiquitous and that everything in grammar is metonymy. But if everything is metonymy, we may ask ourselves, how useful is it in descriptive and explanatory terms to refer to anything as metonymy? If the notion is used indiscriminately, it is actually devaluated. Part 2 of the article discusses some such phenomena claimed to be motivated by metonymy, but which on closer inspection turn out not to involve metonymy at all. Section 3 demonstrates that very many metonymies tend to go undetected. This is particularly often the case if the metonymy is a complex one, i.e. if it involves more than one tier. They are also interesting from a theoretical point of view because a number of popular metonymic patterns often discussed in literature as instances of the PART FOR PART type of metonymy may turn out to be amalgams of several tiers of metonymies of either PART FOR WHOLE or WHOLE FOR PART types.

metonymy, grammar, PART FOR PART metonymy, WHOLE FOR PART metonymy, PART FOR WHOLE metonymy

nije evidentirano