What is metonymy?
In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson pointed out that, in addition to metaphor, there is a related conceptual mechanism that is also central to human thought and language: conceptual metonymy. Like metaphor, metonymy has traditionally been analysed as a trope: a purely linguistic device. However, Lakoff and Johnson argued that metonymy, like metaphor, was conceptual in nature. In recent years, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to metonymy. Indeed, some scholars have begun to suggest that metonymy may be more fundamental to conceptual organisation than metaphor, and some have gone so far as to claim that metaphor itself has a metonymic basis, as we will see. Here, we present an overview of the research in cognitive semantics that has been devoted to this topic.
The earliest approach to conceptual metonymy in cognitive semantics was developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). They argued that, like metaphor, metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon, but one that has quite a distinct basis. Consider example (32).
(32) The Beef sandwich has wandering hands.
Imagine that the sentence in (32) is uttered by one waitress to another in a café. This use of the expression ham sandwich represents an instance of metonymy: two entities are associated so that one entity (the item the customer ordered) stands for the other (the customer). As this example demonstrates, linguistic metonymy is referential in nature: it relates to the use of expressions to ‘pin point’ entities in order to talk about them. This shows that metonymy functions differently from metaphor. For example (32) to be metaphorical we would need to understand ham sandwich not as an expression referring to the customer who ordered it, but in terms of a food item with human qualities. Imagine a cartoon, for example, in which a ham sandwich sits at a café table. On this interpretation, we would be attributing human qualities to a ham sandwich, motivated by the metaphor AN INANIMATE ENTITY IS AN AGENT.As these two quite distinct interpretations show, while metonymy is the conceptual relation ‘X stands for Y’, metaphor is the conceptual relation ‘X under stood in terms of Y’.
A further defining feature of metonymy pointed out by Lakoff and Johnson is that it is motivated by physical or causal associations. Traditionally, this was expressed in terms of contiguity: a close or direct relationship between two entites. This explains why the waitress can use the expression the ham sandwich to refer to the customer: there is a direct experiential relationship between the ham sandwich and the customer who ordered it.
A related way of viewing metonymy is that metonymy is often contingent on a specific context. Within a specific discourse context, a salient vehicle activates and thus highlights a particular target. Hence, while correlation based (as opposed to resemblance-based) metaphors are pre-conceptual in origin and are therefore in some sense inevitable associations (motivated by the nature of our bodies and our environment), conceptual metonymies are motivated by communicative and referential requirements.
Finally, Lakoff and Turner (1989) added a further component to the cognitive semantic view of metonymy. They pointed out that metonymy, unlike metaphor, is not a cross-domain mapping, but instead allows one entity to stand for another because both concepts coexist within the same domain. This explains why a metonymic relationship is based on contiguity or conceptual ‘proximity’. The reason ham sandwich in (32) represents an instance of metonymy is because both the target (the customer) and the vehicle (the ham sandwich) belong to the same CAFÉ domain. Kövecses and Radden summarise this view of metonymy as follows:
Metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same domain, or ICM. (Kövecses and Radden 1998: 39)
Observe that Kövecses and Radden frame the notion of metonymy in terms of access rather than mapping. Indeed, other scholars have suggested that metonymy might be usefully considered in terms of a mapping process that activates or highlights a certain aspect of a domain (for discussion see Barcelona 2003b; Croft 1993). From this perspective, metonymy provides a ‘route’ of access for a particular target within a single domain. For example, while it is not usual to describe a human in terms of food, from the perspective of a waitress, the food ordered may be more salient than the customer. For this reason, the food ordered ‘activates’ the customer sitting at a particular table in the café.
Metonymies are represented by the formula ‘B for A’, where ‘B’ is the vehicle and ‘A’ is the target, e.g. PLACE FOR INSTITUTION. This contrasts with the ‘A is B’ formula that represents conceptual metaphor. For instance, in example (33) Buckingham Palace is the vehicle (PLACE) which stands for the BRITISH MONAR CHY, the target (INSTITUTION):
This utterance is an example of the metonymy PLACE FOR INSTITUTION. Figure 9.3 illustrates the distinction between conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.
There are a number of distinct kinds of metonymy that have been identified in the cognitive semantics literature. We briefly illustrate some of these below. In each of the following examples, the vehicle is italicised.
While most of the examples of metonymy we have considered so far relate to noun phrases, metonymic vehicles are not restricted to individual lexical items. For instance, Panther and Thornburg (2003) have argued that indirect speech acts represent instances of metonymy. Consider example (40):
Recall from Chapter 1 that a speech act is an utterance that performs a (linguistic) action. The example in (40) is ‘indirect’ because it counts as a conventional way of making a request, but does so ‘via’ a question about the ability of the addressee to carry out the action (signalled by the interrogative form of the clause), rather than making the request directly (by using an imperative clause like Pass me the salt). Panther and Thornburg argue that indirect speech acts are metonymic, in that the question stands for the request. In other words, the ability to perform the action is a necessary prerequisite (or ‘felicity condition’) for a request to be carried out (Searle 1969), and a question about this ability stands for the request itself.
