Introduccion a la teoria cognitiva de la metonimia (review)

This book may be regarded as the first monographic account of the cognitive theory of metonymy. Its two main goals are—as stated in the preface—(i) to raise the consciousness about metonymy, and (ii) to stimulate a discussion of open questions, at least within the cognitive linguistic community, which has seriously underrated the importance of metonymy when compared with the amount of attention lavished on metaphor, its ‘rich relative’. The volume not only provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the cognitive approach to metonymy up to the late 1990s, but also offers some original proposals by the author, some of which go against the grain of the traditional wisdom in the field.

The volume contains eight chapters, the first of which is a detailed state-of-the-art overview of metonymy research. This introduction also sets the agenda for the main part of the book by pointing out three focal issues: (i) an attempt to work out a comprehensive definition of metonymy (as contrasted with metaphor), (ii) setting up of a framework for a broad typology of metonymies, and (iii) investigation into the interaction of metonymy and metaphor. The actual proposals argued for later throughout the body of the book are prefigured in a sketchy form against this theoretical background in the introduction.

The introduction is followed by a suite of four closely related chapters, each elaborating and building on the immediately preceding one. Chs. 2 and 3 concentrate on idealized cognitive models and the relation of conceptual domains and mental spaces, respectively. The distinction between literal and figurative language, and metaphoric and metonymic expressions is discussed in Ch. 4, while Ch. 5 is devoted to the elaboration of different types of metonymies. Metaphors are typically based on many correspondence mappings, while metonymies are typically one-correspondence mappings, but it is shown that there are also one-correspondence metaphors. Both metaphor and metonymy can be used referentially and predicatively. The upshot of this central part of the book is that the sole and crucial distinction between the two is that metonymic mappings are domain-internal, while metaphoric mappings are domain-external. Metonymies are argued to come in two types, as source-in-target metonymies involving domain expansion, and as target-in-source metonymies involving conceptual reduction. Whenever metaphor and metonymy interact, the latter is dependent on the former.

Ch. 6 provides an in-depth account of the theory of conceptual integration and particularly of the role that metonymic mappings are allotted in this theory. Ch. 7, one of the two longest chapters, is concerned with the communicative function of metonymy against the background of relevance theory. It is an innovative account of the role of metonymy in the derivation of inferences. Metonymy is claimed to lie at the base of explicatures, and these in turn are argued to enable the speaker to draw further implicatures of weak or strong kind. It is also claimed that explicatures can occasionally arise through modifications of assumption schemas by means of metaphoric or metonymic mappings. The final chapter is a two page summary of the main findings of the book.