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A definition of metonymy that has gained some popularity in Cognitive Linguistics contrasts metonymical semantic shifs within a domain or domain matrix with metaphorical shifts that cross domain boundaries. In the past few years, however, this definition of metonymy has become subject to more and more criticism, in the sense that it relies too much on the vague notions of domains or domain matrices to be fully reliable. In this article, we address this problem by focusing on a nonunitary, prototypical definition of contiguity (the concept that used to be seen as the defining feature of metonymy before Cognitive Linguistics introduced domains and domain matrices). On the basis of the traditional pre-structuralist literature on metonymy, we identify a large number of typical metonymical patterns, and show that they can be classiJied in terms of the type of contiguity they are motivated by. We argue that metonymies, starting from spatial partwhole contiguity as the core of the category, can be plotted against three dimensions: strength of contact (going from part-whole containment over physical contact to adjacency without contact), boundedness (involving an extension of the part-whole relationship towards unbounded wholes and parts), and domain (with shifts from the spatial to the temporal, the spatiotemporal and the categorial domain).

A B S T R A C T This paper introduces a method for the analysis of regional linguistic variation. The method identifies individual and common patterns of spatial clustering in a set of linguistic variables measured over a set of locations based on a combination of three statistical techniques: spatial autocorrelation, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. To demonstrate how to apply this method, it is used to analyze regional variation in the values of 40 continuously measured, high-frequency lexical alternation variables in a 26-million-word corpus of letters to the editor representing 206 cities from across the United States.

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