engleski

Metonymy and grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective

Cognitive and other literature on grammaticalization makes use of metaphor in accounting for a wide range of phenomena. The impact of metonymy on grammar, on the other hand, is still a virtually unchartered area although recent years have seen a marked rise in the interest in the interaction between grammar and metonymy, convincingly showing that metonymic processes are crucially involved in shaping central areas of grammar (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal Campo 2002, Brdar 2007, and the chapters in Panther, Thornburg and Barcelona 2009). The interaction between metonymy and grammar is commonly understood, in keeping with the classical cognitive linguistic doctrine about cognitive operations motivating linguistic structures, as unilateral – conceptual metonymy shaping the grammatical system. This simplified way of looking at things might imply that the relationship between metonymy and grammar is one-way traffic, grammar being infinitely plastic and therefore easily formed by metonymic processes. However, the interaction between grammar and metonymy is more complex – it is actually bilateral. By applying a cross-linguistic perspective in studying grammatical effects of metonymy in several small-scale case studies (grinding/portioning, collective nouns, singulative, anti-associative) in Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Uralic, Niltic and Aleut languages, I aim to demonstrate that things are more complex than that and that their interaction practically always involves some two-way traffic. It turns out that whether a certain type of metonymy is available in a given area in a given language is often dependent on the ecological conditions, or the structural givens present in the grammatical system (including its word-formation system and the inventory of its grammatical constructions). In other words, grammatical factors such as the presence or the absence of a given element in the system may play a role in constraining the application of various types of metonymy in that language. Since more than one element may be involved, it is of course possible that the application of a metonymy may be constrained or even blocked by simultaneous absence or presence of the elements in question. In sum, we are led to conclude that, depending on its particular character, one language’s grammatical “effect” of metonymy may turn out to be another language’s constraint on the application of metonymy.

metonymy ; grammar ; cross-linguistic approach

nije evidentirano