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Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication

Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and Lorena Perez Hernandez link work on conceptual metonymy in cognitive linguistics to Gricean pragmatics and relevance theory. The authors start with the assumption generally accepted in cognitive linguistics that metonymy and metaphor are tools for understanding and reasoning about the world. They reduce metonymy to two basic types: metonymies where the target concept is part of the source concept (target-in-source metonymies) and metonymies where the source is part of the target (source-in-target metonymies). Relying on recent work by Papafragou and Carston, Ruiz and Perez argue that metaphor and metonymy are part of what is said, rather than what is implicated - in contrast to previous relevance-theoretic and Gricean analyses. However, the authors strongly object to Carston's idea that metonymy and metaphor are "loose" ways of speaking with the principle of relevance as sufficient to account for their interpretation. Rather, Ruiz and Perez propose that the principle of relevance must be supplemented by metaphoric and metonymic mappings, i.e. cognitive operations available to speakers and hearers that are part and parcel of the their semantic and conceptual knowledge. The authors also argue for a view of metaphor and metonymy as forming a continuum. They present an interesting analysis of anaphoric relations in discourse that involve referential metonymic shifts as in The ham sandwich is waiting for his check and he is getting upset where the grammatical form of the anaphoric pronouns his and he is determined by the targeted referent of ham sandwich. In contrast, in Nixon bombed Hanoi and he killed countless civilians, it is the source expression Nixon that determines the grammatical properties of the coreferential pronoun. Ruiz and Perez account for such examples by means of a principle that they call the Domain Availability Principle, according to which the larger domain (matrix domain) - be it the source or the target - determines the domain of coreference.

metonymy, inference, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor, cognitive processes, implication

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