Information AboutMetonymy |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT METONYMY | |
| rhetorical techniques | |
| literary devices playing with meaning | |
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Metaphor - The ship plowed through the sea. Metonymy - The sails crossed the ocean. In Cognitive Linguistics , metonymy refers to the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity and is one of the basic characteristics of Cognition . It is common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it. A few commonly used examples of metonymy are: Cognitively, metonymy is attested in cognitive processes underlying language (e.g. the infant's association of the nipple with milk). Objects that appear strongly in a single context emerge as cognitive labels for the whole concept, thus fueling linguistic labels such as "sweat" to refer to hard work that might produce it. The word ''metonymy'' is derived from Greek ''beyond/changed'' and , a suffix used to name figures of speech from ''name'' ( OED )) (. METONYMY VS. METAPHOR IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND LINGUISTICS Metaphor and metonymy are both Figures Of Speech where one word may be used in place of another. However, especially in cognitive science and linguistics, the two figures of speech work very differently. Roman Jakobson argued that they represent two fundamentally different ways of processing language; he noted that different forms of Aphasia affected the ability to interpret the two figures differently (). Metonymy works by the Contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas metaphor works by the Similarity between them. When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with Metaphor : there is nothing press-like about reporters or crown-like about a monarch, but "the press" and "the crown" are both common metonyms. Two examples using the term "fishing" help make the distinction clear (example drawn from Dirven, 1996). The phrase "to fish pearls" uses metonymy, drawing from "fishing" the idea of taking things from the ocean. What is carried across from "fishing fish" to "fishing pearls" is the domain of usage and the associations with the ocean and boats, but we understand the phrase in spite of rather than because of the literal meaning of fishing: we know you do not use a fishing rod or net to get pearls and we know that pearls are not, and do not originate from, fish. In contrast, the metaphorical phrase "fishing for information", transfers the concept of fishing into a new domain. If someone is "fishing" for information, we do not imagine that he or she is anywhere near the ocean, rather we transfer elements of the action of fishing (waiting, hoping to catch something that cannot be seen) into a new domain (a conversation). Thus, metonymy works by calling up a domain of usage and an array of associations (in the example above, boats, the ocean, gathering life from the sea) whereas metaphor picks a target set of meanings and transfers them to a new domain of usage. Example: "Lend me your ear" Sometimes, metaphor and metonymy can both be at work in the same figure of speech, or one could interpret a phrase metaphorically or metonymically. For example, the phrase "lend me your ear" could be analyzed in a number of ways. We could imagine the following interpretations: # Metonymy only: Analyze "ear" metonymically first — "ear" means "attention" (because we use ears to pay attention to someone's speech). Now when we hear the phrase "lending ear (attention)", we stretch the base meaning of "lend" (to let someone borrow an object) to include the "lending" of non-material things (attention), but beyond this slight extension of the verb, no metaphor is at work. # Metaphor only: Imagine the whole phrase literally — imagine that the speaker literally borrows the listener's ear as a physical object (and presumably the person's head with it). Then the speaker has temporary possession of the listener's ear, so the listener has granted the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears. We then interpret the phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean that the speaker wants the listener to grant the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears. # Metaphor and metonymy: First, analyze the verb phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean "turn your ear in my direction," since we know that literally lending a body is nonsensical. Then, analyze the motion of ears metonymically — we associate "turning ears" with "paying attention", which is what the speaker wants the listeners to do. It is difficult to say which of the above analyses most closely represents the way a listener interprets the expression, and it is possible that the phrase is analysed in different ways by different listeners, or even by one and the same listener at different times. Regardless, all three analyses yield the same interpretation; thus, metaphor and metonymy, though quite different in their mechanism, can work together seamlessly. For further analysis of idioms in which metaphor and metonymy work together, including an example very similar to the one given here, see . METONYMY IN POLYSEMY The concept of metonymy also informs the nature of Polysemy — i.e. how the same phonological form (word) has different semantic mappings (meanings). If the two meanings are unrelated, as in the word ''pen'' meaning ''writing instrument'' versus ''enclosure'', they are considered Homonym s, otherwise they are logical polysemies or simple polysemies. Within logical polysemies, a large class of mappings can be considered to be a case of metonymic transfer (e.g. ''chicken'' for the animal, as well as its meat; ''crown'' for the object, as well as the institution). Other cases where the meaning is polysemous however, may turn out to be more metaphorical, e.g. ''eye'' as in the ''eye of the needle''. See also: |
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