Verbal synesthesia is generally considered to be a special type of metaphor involving concepts stemming from distinct sensory domains. However, with the upsurge of metonymy research some authors have proposed a metonymic motivation for synesthetic expressions. In line with these proposals, I argue in my paper that (i) a considerable portion of synesthetic expressions are in fact metonymic and (ii) they are based either on co-occurrence or on an intra-modal resemblance of sensory stimuli. Since olfaction offers itself as an ideal terrain to study synaesthetic expressions due to its relatively poor lexicalization in most languages, in order to test my hypotheses, I present the results of a corpus study on German synesthetic attribute-noun constructions combining gustatory adjectives with olfactory nouns. My results suggest that the heterogeneity of verbal synesthesia regarding its conceptual background cannot be grasped simply by proposing that it is a metaphorical phenomenon.

The possibilities of delimiting linguistic metonymy The starting point of present paper is that the broad notion of conceptual me-tonymy runs the risk of becoming vacuous. In order to avoid this risk, I propose a narrower notion of linguistic metonymy, according to which linguistic metonymies co-active a referential complex consisting of the target and the source content, as well as the relationship between the two so that only the source content is ex-pressed linguistically in an explicit form. Furthermore, I try to show how this nar-rower notion may prove to be helpful in delimiting linguistic metonymy against related phenomena, in particular against active zone phenomena and linguistic metaphors. Keywords: metonymy, linguistic metonymy, conceptual metonymy, active zones, metaphor, implicitness, activation

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