engleski

Metonymy, metaphor and the ‘ weekend’ frame of mind

Recent cross-linguistic research in metonymy has indicated that the availability of referential metonymies is limited in various languages, although it seems to be subject to less severe constraints than predicational ones. A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, such as, (1) She added that Paris was “ surprised” by Tehran’ s announcement. where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German, where it is ubiquitous. The picture is all the more puzzling because the two pairs languages show differences in the distribution of metonymies in question across subparts of the corpora in the sense that the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian— some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. Such extreme deviations are, on the other hand, absent in both our English and German data. Some of the constraints— and thus some of the unevenness in the distribution— have been shown to be pragmatic and grammatical in nature, but there is a considerable residue of such cross-linguistic contrasts that has gone undiscussed and unexplained so far. When examined in more detail along two dimensions, certain regularities emerge from our Hungarian and Croatian. First, the “ hot news” texts exhibit fewer metonymies in question than editorials and commentaries. Secondly, there appears to obtain a sort of cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at weekend days, i.e. in Friday and Saturday editions. It follows that some contrasts in the availability of these metonymies can be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is very general conceptual metaphor: PROXIMITY/DISTANCE IN THE SOCIOPHYSICAL AND MENTAL WORLD IS PROXIMITY/DISTANCE IN TIME. What we assume to be playing an important role in the cultural model in question seem to be pragmatic factors such as perspective and the degree of the empathy and respect or their lack (i.e. detachment) that the journalist feels (and, of course, his or her readership if they adopt the perspective he or she suggests) towards the political authority in question. We may speculate that the viability of capital-for-gernment metonymies is diminished in Hungarian and Croatian news due to journalists’ subconscious deference towards authorities and traditional reluctance to breach the “ safe distance” in real time. However, just before or at the beginning of weekends, this distance is increased as journalists relax and anticipate their day(s) off (as the newspapers in question do not have Sunday editions) projecting themselves mentally into an off-time position offering them more distance from events and entities involved than they have in covering them in real time.

metonymy; metaphor

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