engleski

Where Have All the Metonymies Gone?

As a result of this relative undesirability of metonymies, two types of strategies may be discovered in lan-guages as a way of getting around the problem. Firstly, there may be an attempt to offset or reduce the cost in-curred by employing a corrective device that would relativize the degree of polysemy. There are, for example, various ways in which the ambiguity/polysemy of a metonymic expression can be resolved contextually. What I have in mind, however, as a primary corrective device of lexicalized and grammaticalized metony-mies are metonymy marking strategies. The gist of these strategies is that the speaker embeds certain formal clues, such as so-called function or grammatical words (e.g. articles, dummy it, etc.), grammatical affixes (e.g. plural suffix, various case endings), or grammatical constructions, that should warn the addressee to watch for non-default meanings, and thus prime him/her towards the intended metonymic target. In the course of time, the metonymic interpretation of the expression, en bloc with its marker, may go independent of the default meaning and thus cease to be “ live” metonymy. Secondly, there are what we may term metonymy avoidance strategies. This is meant just as a cover term for a variety of functionally unified but, in formal terms, mutually widely distinct replacement strategies, i.e. this is not a set of strategies exhibiting recognizable internal formal unity or coherence. Examples of these polysemy-resolving and metonymy-avoidance strategies that first come to mind are certainly various types of paraphrases by means of syntactic means (i.e. by supplying a head of the phrase or a modifier/complement that explicitly identifies what would otherwise be the metonymic target), the use of a range of specialized word-formation processes (most notably some specialized affixes, or compounding, where the compound head identifies the in-tended metonymic target and the modifying element specifies the domain in question, or conversion), or alternat-ing use of distinct grammatical constructions (which may be accompanied by the use of lexical items sharing the morphological root and semantics, but crucially belonging to distinct word classes. It will be seen that the two types of strategies may occasionally become almost indistinguishable, or work in tandem, e.g. when conversion is accompanied by formal markers. A detailed examination of both types is also a necessary precondition for working out a more comprehensive typology of polysemy resolution strategies, show-ing how the two complement and/or reinforce each other. Pending a more comprehensive account, at present only some preliminary steps can be made towards at-tempting a typology in terms of their viability, and towards attempting to correlate the two types of strategies with the general typological characterization of these languages. There seem to be at least two types of metonymies in terms of their universal viability: 1. metonymies we actually DO live with, i.e. those we have because must have them and we probably could not live without ; 2. metonymies we CAN live with, i.e. those we can tolerate (with or without marking them as such), but also those we can dispense with, or live without, in which case we use some of the above avoidance strategies. The second type could perhaps be broken down into finer subcategories, according to whether metonymies in question are ore likely to be lived with or without. Of course, it is possible that there is a third general type: 3. metonymies we CANNOT live with (notice that can is used here not so much epistemically, as dynami-cally/deontically), i.e. metonymies that are not viable for any reason (conceptual or formal), and are virtually never found. Ideally, we should be able to characterize languages in terms of: 1. where the cut-off point is for the use/availability/tolerance of certain types of metonymy (in terms of tra-ditional typologies of metonymy, but also in terms of the distinction between 1. and 2. above) ; 2. how they mark/avoid metonymy 3. whether there are any structural correlates in the system of metonymy-friendliness (and metonymy-unfriendliness), e.g. what is the role of the more agglutinative type of derivational morphology (with a great deal of monofunctional affixes), or of the portmanteau type of derivational morphology (cramming more meanings on a single morpheme), what is the role of a more isolating morphosyntax, and related to this, where does the attrition of words come in both phonological and inflectional sense (i.e. situation in which the majority of lexical items a language has are relatively short and relatively uninflectable, say monosyllabic unchangeable words).

metonymy; metaphor; metaphtonymy; polysemy; grammar; suffixation; animal grinding; mass noun; proper noun; grounding

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