engleski

How to do a couple of things with metonymy

Because most recent cognitive linguistic research on metonymy has been concerned with uncovering inferential processes underlying it as well as with stressing its conceptual nature and thus refuting the classical view stipulating that it is just a matter of transfer of lexical meaning, the focus has always been mainly on its referential nature, some of its other pragmatic aspects receiving hardly any attention. The present paper undertakes to highlight some of these other, largely unnoticed, pragmatic layers that attach to metonymy in wider discourse. First, it has hardly ever been pointed out that one of the most important textual functions of metonymy is to enhance the cohesion and coherence of the utterance, although this appears almost self-evident when metonymic chains occurring in natural data in their context are considered. In a second layer of pragmatic aspects that attach to metonymies of various types we find a range of effects at the interpersonal level. Metonymies can, for example, be put to very effective use by speakers in managing responsibility in a more or less subtle manner. My main goal in this paper is to document these pragmatic functions and show that its referential function, providing a means of more or less indirect reference, actually serves as a springboard for its use in the fine-tuning of background assumptions, effectively attenuating or attributing responsibility for some states of affairs, a use which often remains quite inconspicuous. The organization of the paper reflects these pragmatic functions or uses of metonymy. In Part 2, I start with its most important and most obvious pragmatic function, the referential one. Specifically, I review the evidence that metonymy is not purely referential in nature, showing that some types can help understanding, similarly to what has been observed with metaphors. Focusing on the referential type of metonymy, I proceed in Part 3 to show that metonymy can have a text-constitutive role, i.e. metonymy can enhance text cohesion (and coherence) when used as a device to maintain nominal topic continuity, i.e. as a means of keeping the same metonymic source topic while occasionally switching between metonymic targets, or targeted topics. I also show that topic continuity can be achieved even by some non-canonical forms of metonymy, viz. by metonymically used prepositional phrases, particularly in Slavic languages, as well as in Hungarian. Finally, in Part 4, I demonstrate how such metonymic prepositional phrases can be used for manipulation, effectively attenuating or attributing responsibility for some states of affairs. The paper closes with a brief analysis of a specific example of predication metonymy, the expression to pull/squeeze the trigger, which is also used to manage responsibility.

metonymy; metaphor; pragmatics; topic; cohesion; coherence; text; discourse functions of metonymy; responsibility management

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