engleski

Introduction: Metonymy across languages

Typological research has hitherto focused mainly on morpho-syntactic differences and commonalities among the world's languages. With the exception of contrastive analyses of lexical fields, conceptual structure, to our knowledge, has not been the object of systematic cross-linguistic inquiry. The researchers who present their work in this special issue of Jezikoslovlje have been among the first to notice that metonymies (like metaphors) do not necessarily work the same way in all languages. They believe that new insights into language typology can be gained from looking more closely into cross-linguistic differences in metonymy exploitation. The kinds of intriguing empirical questions that present themselves with regard to the cross-linguistic study of metonymy include: 1. Are there metonymic principles that are operative in all languages, i.e., are there metonymic universals? 2. Is it possible to find a typological classification of the world's languages in terms of metonymic principles and how would it differ from grammar-based classifications? 3. How do metonymic principles interact with grammatical structure? 4. How do individual languages differ in the exploitation of individual high-level metonymies?

metonymy; typology of metonymies; ICM; metaphor; high-level metonymy; grammatical structure

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