engleski

Ways of getting around and signalling metonymy in the grammar of noun phrases

A number of contrastive studies on metonymy have suggested that the presence of various types of metonymies in a given language can be characterized in terms of two extremes: the ubiquity of metonymies, on the one hand, and their absence, on the other. It is claimed in the present paper that the truth is somewhere in the middle and that both ubiquity and absence are relative and have to be qualified. The present paper focuses on a phenomenon that, with its various manifestations, seem to fall somewhere between the two extremes, viz. metonymies that appear to depend for their viability more or less on some formal indications of their being used as metonymies. Specifically, referential metonymies are investigated, as they are ex-pected to come closer to the ideal of being near-universal. After a series of case studies offer-ing evidence for the dependence of metonymies on such signalling and/or marking, their find-ings are interpreted in the context of the communicative function of metonymies.

metonymy; typology of metonymies; referential metonymies; cognitive processes; grammar; mass nouns; proper names; metaphtonymy; metaphor

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