engleski

Metonymic coding of linguistic action in English, Croatian and Hungarian

The present paper is a detailed study of English sentences like The President was clear on the matter and their equivalents in Croatian and Hungarian. What is peculiar about the verbal locution to be clear on some matter is that it is conventionally used to refer to a speech act ('to speak clearly on some matter') where the speech act itself is not explicitly coded in the expression but conventionally evoked via a metonymy MANNER (or LINGUISTIC ACTION) FOR LINGUISTIC ACTION. The degree of conventionalization of this metonymy varies from a strongly implicated but still cancelable target meaning to complete lexicalization that defies defeasibility. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó demonstrate that this predicational metonymy is much more constrained in Croatian and Hungarian than in English. Both Croatian and Hungarian are more likely to explicitly cod the linguistic action itself. The authors see a more general typological ten- dency for these languages to avoid predicational metonymies, whereas referential metonymies of the type Beijing's difficulties in Tibet are also systematically exploitable in Croatian and Hungarian. It is suggested that there may exist an implicational relationship between referential and predicational metonymies: Languages that systematically exploit predicational metonymies will also make extensive use of referential metonymies ; some languages will be largely restricted to referential metonymies.

metonymy, inference, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, typology, linguistic action, typology of metonymies

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