engleski

From metaphorical banana skins to metonymic rittbergers: On two types of polysemy

Polysemy resolution is currently one of the most intriguing topics on the research agenda of many theoretical and applied linguists, particularly those concerned with machine translation, lexicography, and information retrieval. As is well-known, two most important mechanisms giving rise to polysemy are metaphor and metonymy, so that polysemy resolution most of the time boils down to drawing a distinction between a literal on the one hand, and figurative, i.e. metaphoric or metonymic meaning, on the other. A number of ongoing research projects are concerned with the detection of signals of figurative meaning in texts in the sense of screening out figurative uses from literal language but the question whether metaphorical and metonymic senses are signalled in different ways has practically never been addressed in literature. In this chapter we would like to demonstrate that metaphors and metonymies often tend to be signalled in different ways and to submit that this might be another important point of contrast between the two. In the concluding part we point out that metaphor and metonymy produce two different types of polysemy. Authentic data retrieved from the Google search engine and the British National Corpus which show that metaphors and metonymies tend to be formally signalled in different ways, the former in a more analytic way, and the latter in a synthetic way. We also report the results of a simple experiment showing different potential to evoke figurative meaning of metaphor- and metonymy-prone expressions in a context-free environment. In Part 4 of this chapter we consider possible motivation for this distribution, consider the possibility that the two, together with literal language, form a continuum, as suggested by Radden (2002), and point out how this correlates with the differences in the regularity and nature of polysemy effects produced by metaphor and metonymy, respectively.

figurative meaning signals; metaphor; metonymy; polysemy

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