engleski

Metonymy and grammatical recategorisation of nouns

This paper presents some of the ideas of how metonymy may serve as a useful didactic tool in presenting, at first blush, rather arbitrary distribution of countability category in the major word class of nouns in English. Out of several such mechanisms, we have chosen to examine how transpositions from the category of mass nouns into the category of count nouns and vice versa may be methodologically presented and explained in terms of metonymic mappings within one conceptual domain. The examples will show a clear-cut nature of referential metonymy as a universal cognitive category which eradicates the traditionally and formally imposed boundaries between lexis and grammar.

metonymy, countability, cognitive grammar, recategorization, conversion

nije evidentirano