engleski

Metonymic networks, subjecthood, and topic continuity across languages: When tiers collapse and chains break

Drawing on the rich tradition of Polish theoretical work in contrastive linguistics, we move freely in two case studies on referential metonymies between a number of methodological tools such as text-bound and systematic contrastive analysis, statistical, translational, semanto-syntactic, substantial and pragmatic equivalence (Krzeszowski) aiming: 1. to uncover a whole series of fine-grained contrasts with regard to the productivity of conceptual metonymies in English, German, Croatian and Hungarian (of the type that has so far gone unnoticed), in the sense that metonymic chains can exhibit significant differences with respect to both their productivity and their length, or in the number of metonymic tiers languages typically allow, and 2. to show how these cross-linguistic differences and similarities can be motivated by linking them in a long range manner to some other contrastive facts about these languages that have to do with subjecthood, morphosyntactic agreement, and topic-continuity, i.e. the morphosyntactic givens of the respective systems and the information packaging preferences in these languages.

metonymy; metaphor; cognitive linguistics; contrastive linguistics; polysemy

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