Conceptual metonymy

Dylan Glynn (1)

1 LECSeL - Linguistique Empirique : Cognition, Société et Langage

This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003) as a starting point and raises further questions on its linguistic structure and cognitive processing. Although we agree with Truszczyńska that the fundamental issues for the study of conceptual metonymy are concept delimitation and concept structure, we argue that she overlooks some important insights into these issues. We focus especially on the interaction of metaphor and metonymy and Langacker’s (1987) cognitive grammar and its proposals for the structuring and processing of metonymic language. We propose a methodology for concept delimitation and an alternative explanation for concept structuring. These are applied in a small case study of metonymic expressions for ‘sorry’ and ‘forgive’ in English. The discussion concludes that although better concept delimitation is an important step for the rigorous treatment of metonymic relations, current cognitive approaches to metonymy still do not offer sufficient means for explaining the role of context dependent signification.

Mots clés: Cognitive Linguistics; Metonymy; categorisation

Domaines: Linguistique

Dylan Glynn. Conceptual metonymy: A study in cognitive models, reference-points, and domain boundaries. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2006, 42, pp.85-102. ⟨halshs-01284992⟩