Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 6: Metonymy

September 11, 2008

Metonymy

Metonymy is the use of piece of language that is usually used to refer to some entity or event a to refer to some other entity or event b that is related in some way to a.

Reference is often direct – a word or description directly refers to (identifies) some category or referent in the speaker/hearer’s conceptual system.

· Common nouns usually identify categories, which indirectly allow access to referents

oatmeal, liver, scratch paper

· Proper nouns usually identify referents

Richard Nixon, The Pistons, The Big Lebowski

· Descriptions can identify either

My favorite food, that thing in your pocket, the current president

But sometimes we can refer to things indirectly. When two things (categories, referents) are related in some way, we can use a name for or description for one thing to refer to the other - metonymy.

· Intrinsic relations are independent of context

o Part-whole

§ I see a whole lot of new faces here today.

§ The guests went through another four handles of vodka.

o Entity-attribute

§ IBM dropped $5 a share today.

§ The brunettes have the blonds outnumbered 5-to-1.

· Extrinsic relations only exist transiently in context

§ Room 23 isn't answering

§ I'm parked out back.

§ The hash browns in the corner is getting impatient.

In more formal terms, this required relation is known as the ID principle: If two objects a and b are linked by a pragmatic function F, then either a or a description of a, may be used to refer to b.

author ------F1-------> book

(a) (relation) (b)

E.g. if pragmatic function F1 links authors to their books, we can refer to books using descriptions or names of the authors, e.g. Plato is on the top shelf means The books by Plato are on the top shelf.

Of course, in this case, as in most, many other pragmatic functions could be involved.

Another example of a pragmatic connector: food to customers

food ------F-------> customer

(a) (relation) (b)

Here, we get sentences like The mushroom omelet left without paying.

Group work

Look at the following linguistic expressions.

The thing I love about Matisse is how evocative the lines are.

Sit your butts down!

Once election season comes around, politicians all toe the party line.

My aunt smokes two packs a day.

My computer monitor is completely dead.

The mohawk in the back of the bus looks like trouble.

The problem with people from Wisconsin is that those cheeseheads are always smiling.

It now looks like the White House will never sign the Kyoto Accord.

Whatever you do, don’t spill the beans about the surprise party.

· Which of them are examples of metonymy, and which are not?

· What type of pragmatic relation do the metonymic expressions use?

What's interesting about metonymy:

Two of the core functions of language are to:

· refer: to identify the stuff that is being talked about

· predicate: to give information about that stuff.

Every theory of language has to first and foremost be able to account for reference and predication.

· In some cases, stuff can be referred to indirectly, as in metonymy.

o Plato referring to his ashes.

· And you can predicate about stuff that's referred to metonymically.

o is on the top shelf.

· Moreover, conventionalization of metonymical reference accounts for polysemy patterns.

o corner, head, etc.

· And there are sometimes grammatical reflexes of metonymy,

o subcategorization: subject of like are animate, but: Washington likes the new election policy.

o agreement: verbs have to agree with the subject, but: The garden salad wants to leave.

o anaphor: pronouns agree with their referents, but The mashed potatoes wants his check.

We've already seen how metonymy seems to result in different processing of words than homonymy - this would seem to imply that there is something cognitively real about metonymic processes.