Metonymy revisited

What is it about?

This paper presents a fully inferential relevance-theoretic account of metonymy based on the assumption that metonymy is a case of tagging the intended referent in a special way. The real-world contiguity which underlies metonymic usage is postulated to be encapsulated in mental schemas that are indexed by the concept that the metonymic word or phrase provides access to.

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Why is it important?

Metonymy is a pervasive aspect of spontaneous as well as reflective linguistic performance and its cognitive and communicative role needs to be adequately attended to. Even though they are full of interesting observations about the role of metonymy in online meaning construction and bring to light a varied spectrum of different types of metonymic conceptualizations, cognitive linguistic analyses seem to offer no convincing rationale for metonymic uses in verbal communication and do not articulate a psychologically plausible and testable principle that would explain why metonymy arises and how the intended meaning is inferred in context by the recipient. Applying a relevance-theoretic model of utterance interpretation, the postulated model of metonymy attempts to explain the motivation for speakers to resort to using metonymic expressions and to provide an account on how such expressions are comprehended.

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