engleski

Cross-cultural variation in the use of one type of metonymic synonyms

The authors examine the use of two metonymies CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT and COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT in metonymic chains stretching through a portion of text to boost its cohesion while maintaining topic continuity. If it is assumed that metonymic vehicles alternate in a simple and elegant way thus producing metonymic chains of the form CAPITAL-COUNTRY-CAPITAL-COUNTRY-etc. it could be expected that frequency of metonymies of the type CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT and the type COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT is fairly even. However, the close examination of authentic usage events from Croatian and Hungarian reveals that this is not the case as the frequency of the CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT metonymy is generally much lower than the frequency of the COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT metonymy. Authors argue that the use of the former metonymy is constrained by the interplay of cultural-conceptual and communicative pragmatic factors, such as perspective and the degree of the empathy or its lack towards the authority in question, made possible by a variant of the conceptual metaphor EMOTIONAL DISTANCE IS DISTANCE IN PHYSICAL SPACE.

metonymy ; metaphor ; synonymy ; cognitive linguistics ; culture ; variation

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