No abstract

The central issue that concerns us in this chapter is whether metonymy should be conceived as a mapping. The way metonymies function in authentic discourse indicates that we have two-way traffic. The initial conceptual substrate is designated by the source concept, but it is plastic and flexible enough to allow considerable customizing, often within complex metonymic networks. The inferences that steer the customizing are guided by the information based on text (i.e., cotext) and context (circumstances). It is argued that metonymy should best be approached as an inference-based domain elaboration (either expansion or reduction) of the metonymic source, in the course of which domains are tailored to an optimal conceptual measure with regard to their function.

No abstract

In a recent paper published in this journal, Laura Janda makes a number of claims about metonymy, specifically about metonymy in word-formation as part of grammar. In a nutshell, what she says is that suffixed nouns such as Russian saxarnica (from saxar ‘sugar’) ‘sugar bowl’, Czech břicháč (from břicho ‘belly’) ‘person with a large belly’, or Norwegian baker ‘baker’, are metonymic extensions from saxar ‘sugar’, břicho ‘belly’, and bake ‘bake’, respectively. It is our contention that this claim about metonymy being involved in word-formation phenomena such as suffixation is misconceived and leads to an overuse of the term ‘metonymy’. We first comment on Janda's views on cognitive linguistic research on metonymy in grammar and word-formation, and then evaluate the evidence that she provides to support her central claim – from some general claims about metonymy and grammar to the way she identifies metonymy in word-formation. Finally, we point out a series of problems ensuing from the concept of word-formation metonymy. The analytical parts of Janda's article are in our view a more or less traditional cross-linguistic inventory of suffixation patterns that do not exhibit metonymy as such. However, some genuine metonymies that crop up among her examples are glossed over. In other words, we claim that her analysis ignores metonymies where they appear and postulates metonymies where they do not exist.

The present chapter deals with the problem of the construction of meaning of figuratively used personal names in the basic constructional schema Det + Xpersonal name + of Y. After a brief overview of two currently dominant philosophical approaches to problems of reference that are at odds with cognitive linguistic views, we proceed to outline a path along which their meaning is developed in several successive steps. The starting point is the enlistment of our total encyclopedic knowledge about the bearers of proper names organized in complex matrixes of domains. We outline how figurative meanings arise in a step by step fashion, involving tiers of metonymic mappings interspersed with metaphoric mappings. In doing so we also demonstrate that the paragon model can be elaborated in such a way that specific mappings become well motivated.The process of the construction of figurative meaning is shown to be complex, dynamic and flexible. Its output can be revised at every step, further enriched with information, or subsequently depleted of it, depending on the cognitive operations employed.