Metonymy in Language and Thought (review)

Seventeen first-rate papers from a workshop held 23–24 June 1996 at Hamburg University present metonymy within a conceptual framework of scenarios, scenes, frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models (ICMs). There are four parts: (1) theoretical aspects, (2) historical aspects within a cognitive framework, (3) case studies, and (4) application to language acquisition and literary criticism.

Must reading includes ‘Towards a theory of metonymy’ by G ü nterR addenand Z oltánK ö vecses, especially since subsequent articles often address the same theoretical issues. Metonymy, as a cognitive process, crosscuts three ontological realms—concepts, (language) forms, and things/events—thereby accessing one conceptual entity via another. A hierarchical ordering of form > form-concept > concept > reality governs the choice of a metonymic vehicle. The complexity of such crosscutting is traced through the semantic history of hearsewith a wide range of metaphoric and metonymic conceptual associations.

Theoretical issues include (1) types of conceptual relationships that give rise to metonymy (a whole ICM in relation to its parts gives rise to metonymy involving things; relations between parts of an ICM give rise to metonymies involving events and states) and (2) cognitive principles that govern the default cases of metonymy. This excellent section focuses on the centrality of human experience in our anthropocentric orientation to the world, our perception of things in the world, and the influence of culture in our choice of metonymic vehicles. Next, communicative principles of clarity and relevance are shown to contribute to the default selection of metonymic vehicles. Their suggested metonymical hierarchies for motivation are very insightful as is their suggestion that rhetorical and figurative speech can violate the communicative principles to yield ‘non-default’ cases.

Another fine article is G illesF auconnierand M arkT urner’s ‘Metonymy and conceptual integration [i.e. blending]’. The result of blending is a network which inherits some structure from the input worlds but has an emergent structure of its own, obtained by elaboration and pattern completion. Other important concepts include the roles of metonymy and metaphor in blending and how optimality principles interact and compete in metonymy. A successful blend accomplishes three goals: (1) It is concrete and specific; (2) it fits the frames of the input worlds; and (3) the objects in the blend connect back to the principal concepts in the input worlds. The result of successful blending is a typology that retains essential elements from the input worlds and dynamically integrates them in the creative typology of the blend.

Also must reading is K urtF eyaerts’s ‘Metonymic hierarchies’ in which he uses German idiomatic expressions for stupidity to demonstrate that metaphoric hierarchies are paralleled by large-scale metonymic structures. Such structures are characterized by higher level, more abstract mappings being realized by lower level, more specific and concrete mappings; higher-level mappings being more transcultural but lower-level mappings being more culture-specific; and patterns of overlap occurring between different metaphoric mappings [perhaps reflecting a composite structure?].

The book concludes with a useful index of metonymies and metaphors.