engleski

The (non-)metonymic use of place names in English, German, Hungarian, and Croatian

This chapter investigates the function of metonymy from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The authors begin with the observation that much recent research seems to indicate that referential metonymies are relatively unconstrained. However, in a corpus-based study on metonymically used place names, in particular the capital for government metonymy, in the language of the media the authors find that, while this type of metonymy is ubiquitous in English and German, it seems much less frequently used in Hungarian and Croatian. The constraints appear, at first blush, to be due to cognitive, discourse-pragmatic, and cultural factors. A detailed analysis reveals that some of the contrasts can be attributed to the fact that English and German metonymically-used locative NPs that function as subjects often find their counterparts in Hungarian and Croatian in prepositional phrases, or in attributively used adjectives. It is claimed that such phrases, which maintain topic-continuity, are also full-blown referential metonymies. The paper points to the importance of considering not only how metonymy influences grammar, but also how a language’ s typological properties may influence the syntactic form and function of a metonymic vehicle.

contrastive analysis; Croatian; cross-linguistic variation; English; German; grammar; Hungarian; locative; metonymy; prepositional phrase; referential metonymy; topic-continuity; typology

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