engleski

Beyond the Friend’s Constraint: On cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences in the use of two types of synonymous metonymies

Metonymy normally produces an asymmetric type of synonymy linking the lexical item functioning as the metonymic vehicle (L1) and the lexical item associated with the metonymic target concept (L2). L1 can function as a synonym of L2, but not vice versa. However, it is occasionally possible for one and the same metonymic target to be accessed by means of two or perhaps more different metonymic vehicles, in which case these form part of a metonymic chain and function as symmetric synonyms. As is usual with synonyms, they cannot be freely substituted for each other in all contexts. Our first research question concerns their distribution. We therefore examine such a pair of metonymic synonyms, viz. COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT and CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT in English, German, Croatian and Hungarian, using corpus data. We first establish a general distribution across these four languages and then study the ratio of the two metonymies denoting the country and the capital, respectively, within more specific linguistic-cultural communities. We thus study the pair USA/America and Washington for the American English subcorpus, UK/GB and London for the British English subcorpus, etc. also including Canadian and Australian subcorpora, and comparable German, Croatian as well as Hungarian corpora, all including regional subcorpora. We also study the use of the two metonymies from a diachronic perspective and establish certain trends in their use. The preliminary data indicate that the COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT metonymy is more frequent than the CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT, which gives rise to our second research question: why use one rather than the other member of the metonymic pair under certain circumstances? The answer to this question seems to be that the alternation between the two metonymy types is dictated by the interplay of some communicative-pragmatic and cultural-conceptual factors. As the former were discussed in a number of articles (Brdar & Brdar-Szabó 2009, Brdar 2015), we concentrate here on the latter. It is argued that the underuse of the CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT as compared to the COUNTRY FOR GOVERNMENT metonymy in some linguistic-cultural communities is related to a complex cultural model first described and referred to by Kalisz (1983) as the Friend’s Constraint. Specifically, we show that the observed differences can be motivated by a broader cultural model we dub FRIENDS-AND-FOES model. This model, widely spread, though apparently not universal, is built around a very general conceptual metaphor: PROXIMITY/DISTANCE IN THE SOCIAL AND MENTAL WORLD IS PROXIMITY/DISTANCE IN SPACE/TIME.

Metonymy, Synonymy, Cultural Model, Cross-Linguistic Comparison, Cross-Cultural Comparison

nije evidentirano