engleski

How to do a couple of things with metonymy

Metonymies are in contemporary cognitive linguistic research considered to be very efficient mental shortcuts, as they have the advantage of communicating additional information. This is at the very heart of metonymy as a conceptual operation where one content stands for another, while both are actually activated to at least some degree. Informally speaking, metonymy is an efficient means of saying two things for the price of one. Because most recent cognitive linguistic research on metonymy has been concerned with uncovering inferential processes underlying it as well as with stressing its conceptual nature and thus refuting the classical view stipulating that it is just a matter of transfer of lexical meaning, the focus has always been mainly on its referential nature, some of its other pragmatic aspects receiving hardly any attention. The present paper undertakes to highlight some of these other, largely unnoticed, pragmatic layers that attach to metonymy in wider discourse. First, it has hardly ever been pointed out that one of the most important textual functions of metonymy is to enhance the cohesion and coherence of the utterance, although this appears almost self-evident when metonymic chains occurring in natural data in their context are considered. A case study investigating the role of CAPITAL-FOR-GOVERNMENT metonymies in managing topic-continuity is intended to demonstrate this. In a second layer of pragmatic aspects that attach to metonymies of various types we find a range of effects at the interpersonal level. Case studies on metonymic mappings in raising constructions, metonymic use of personal and place names, as well as on SUBEVENT-FOR-WHOLE-EVENT metonymies are offered as demonstrations of how metonymies can be put to effective use by speakers in more or less subtly managing responsibility.

metonymy; topic; cohesion; coherence; text; responsibility management

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