engleski

Metonymy based on cultural background knowledge and pragmatic inferencing: Evidence from spoken television discourse

Metonymy has been explored in both the field of cognitive linguistics and in pragmatics. A common object of inquiry of both fields is to interpret human understanding and reasoning and how it is reflected in language. Pragmaticists are mostly concerned with the ability of drawing inferences. In cognitive linguistics, metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon that plays a role in pragmatic inferencing. Panther and Thornburg (1998, 2003) call metonymies 'natural inference schemas' i.e. easily activatable associations among concepts that can be used for inferential purposes. To appreciate the value of metonymy for pragmatic inferencing, metonymy should not be viewed as performing only its prototypical referential function. Metonymic mappings are operative in speech acts at the level of reference, predication, proposition and illocution. The aim of this paper is to study the role of metonymy in pragmatic inferencing in spoken discourse in televison interviews. We present case analyses of authentic utterances classified as illocutionary metonymies following the pragmatic typology of metonymic functions (Panther and Thornburg 1999). The interpretation of these cases is based on the definition of metonymy as a mapping of knowledge from a source domain onto a target domain. Source and target domains are in the same functional domain and they are linked by a pragmatic function (Barcelona 2002). The source of metonymy highlights the target meaning that becomes salient in a given communicative situation. We agree with Panther and Thornburg (2003) that source meanings remain active to some degree. The inferences are facilitated by metonymic connections existing between domains or sub-domains in the same functional domain. The standard approach to the cognitive linguistic theory of metonymy emphasizes the conceptual and cognitive nature of metonymy where universal human knowledge and embodiment are essential for the interpretation of metonymy. Our analysis points to the role of cultural background knowledge in understanding target meanings. All these aspects of metonymic connections are exploited in complex inferential processes. .

Spoken discourse; pragmatic inferencing; metonymy; cognitive linguistics

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