engleski

Manner-for-activity metonymy in a cross-linguistic perspective

Last decade has seen a number of insightful studies into metonymy, mostly dealing with English material. Since both metonymy and metaphor are in the framework of cognitive linguistics taken to be basic and universally attested processes that help shape conceptual structures and linguistic expressions, the tacit assumption was that most high-level generalizations that have been established for English (or any other language that happened to provide the empirical confirmation of theoretical claims) should largely hold for other languages as well, discounting of course such language-specific factors as the availability of certain lexical items, some cultural factors, etc. In other words, one might expect that similar arrays of metonymically motivated constructions will be found to be fairly frequent in cross-linguistic terms. Regrettably, cross-linguistic studies checking this assumption explicitly have been too few. Their findings, however, make it clear that it is a worthwhile enterprise, to say the least, as borne out, for example, by Kalisz (1983) and Panther & Thornburg (1999a & b). With this goal in mind, we have shown in Brdar & Brdar-Szabó (2000) that Croatian and Hungarian, unlike English, appear reluctant to make use of the MANNER-FOR-ACTIVITY metonymy in the domain of linguistic action. In order to check whether the observed cross-linguistic differences are just incidental, because it is perhaps an idiosyncratic trait of Croatian and Hungarian that they fail to use this specific subtype of metonymic model, or whether they might be of a wider significance, we set out to extend our comparison in this paper by: i. systematically examining a more general type of metonymy in a number of different, more or less related domains, i.e. not only MANNER-FOR-LINGUISTIC-ACTION metonymy, but also related metonymies such as MANNER-FOR-COGNITIVE-ACTIVITY and MANNER-FOR-BEHAVIOUR metonymies, and by: (i) ii. broadening the range of languages examined for the presence of the above mentioned types of metonymy, specifically by including German and Russian, in addition to English, Croatian and Hungarian. A comparison of English with languages like German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian has show that the latter languages regularly fail to tolerate polysemy based on metonymy in other constructions as well, e.g. neither of the four languages exhibits a productive use of raising constructions involving predicative adjectives, i.e. subject-to-subject-raising with certain or sure, and tough-construction. English again exhibits here fairly schematic elements specifying the active zone, i.e. non-finite clauses, or just infinitival particles (cf. Langacker 1995), which must be accommodated by the left-hand end of our continuum. There are other structural correlates of this contrast. English has been demonstrated to rely heavily on metonymic processes in rearranging predicate-argument-structures enabling different construals while at the same time keeping formally one and the same form of the predicative expression. The other languages involved tend to formally indicate different arrangements in predicate-argument-structure by using formally different predicative expressions, particularly Russian, Croatian and Hungarian.

metonymy, functional typology of metonymies, predicational metonymy, active zone specification, adjective complementation, contrastive analysis

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