engleski

The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction

The author explores some basic semantic and pragmatic functions of conceptual metonymy. He contends that metonymies provide natural inference schemas constantly used by interlocutors in the constructionand interpretation of meaning. Metonymy is seen as a contingent relation between a source meaning and a target meaning, i.e. as a reasoning pattern that is in principle defeasible. Nevertheless, the degree of entrenchment of the metonymic link and contextual features may constitute an effective barrier to cancellation. The property of defeasibility metonymy shares with conversational implicature and explicature. Metonymy is viewed as a device for meaning elaboration where the source of a metonymic relation is expanded into a more complex conceptual structure that “ contains” the content of the source. In his view, conceptual metonymies occupy an intermediate level of conceptual relations between, on the one hand, very abstract inference-guiding principles and heuristics &agrave ; la Sperber and Wilson and Levinson and, on the other, specific ad hoc inferences employed in the derivation of particularized conversational implicatures. In prototypical metonymic relations the target concept is conceptually prominent, which makes target meanings not only accessible but also available for further elaboration in discourse. Metonymies are ubiquitous on the referential, predicational and illocutionary levels of speech acts. They also perform important functions in resolving semantic conflicts between lexical meaning and constructional meaning and in shaping certain grammatical properties of anaphoric proforms. Finally, the author demonstrates that metonymies are, to a certain extent, organized in taxonomic systems, a property that is illustrated with the various submetonymies of the EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymy.

metonymy; inferencing; iplicature; explicature; typology of metonymies

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