Part 2: Motivation in language

5. Metonymy as a motivating factor in language

5.1. Defining metonymy (in contrast with metaphor)

Metonymy as a stand.for relationship based on contiguity

Activity 5.1. Which expressions in the song below are not used literally?
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel)
I can hear the soft breathing
Of the girl that I love,
As she lies here beside me
Asleep with the night,
And her hair, in a fine mist
Floats on my pillow,
Reflecting the glow
Of the winter moonlight.
She is soft, she is warm,
But my heart remains heavy,
And I watch as her breasts
Gently rise, gently fall,
For I know with the first light of dawn
Ill be leaving,
And tonight will be
All I have left to recall.
Oh, what have I done,
Why have I done it,
Ive committed a crime,
Ive broken the law.
For twenty-five dollars
And pieces of silver,
I held up and robbed
A hard liquor store.
My life seems unreal,
My crime an illusion,
A scene badly written
In which I must play.
Yet I know as I gaze
At my young love beside me,
The morning is just a few hours away.

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(From: Radden, Cognitive English Grammar, 2007)

metonymy is traditionally approached as a stand-for relationship that is, unlike metaphor, not based on similarity but on contiguity or proximity.
contiguity is taken in its broader sense to cover all associative relations except similarity.
this means that metonyms are expressions that are used instead of some other expressions because the latter are associated with or suggested by the former:
(1)

a. The White House declined to comment on the issue.

b. Keep your eye on the ball!
c. He was testifying on the Hill earlier in the week.
d. He emigrated to America in 1969.

(From: Radden, Cognitive English Grammar, 2007)

synecdoche is a figure of speech that is sometimes distinguished from metonymy
in this case, an expression referring to a part is used to refer to some larger whole,
e.g.:
(2) At this point strings take over.

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(3) The kettles boiling.

(4) One of those singled out for merciless treatment was Alexander Slepinin, nicknamed
the Colonel, a three-hundred-pound, six-foot-five black belt who claimed to have
served with the Russian Special Forces in Afghanistan.
(5) No, na prvi reket rjeava pitanje osvajaa drugog seta u 5. gemu.
the notion of contiguity is taken in its broadest sense to cover all associative relations
except similarity, and may thus be too vague a notion, making metonymy almost a
cognitive wastebasket
Panther and Thornburg (2002: 282) attempt to constrain the scope of metonymy by
submitting that the relation between the metonymic source and the target is contingent, i.e. it does not exist by conceptual necessity, thus when a nurse, for example,
refers to a patient as the ulcer in room 506, it is not conceptually necessary for the
ulcer to belong to the patient in room 506
metonymic relation is thus in principle defeasible or cancellable, because the source
concept is still usually retrievable (though backgrounded), even if the target concept
is conventionalized in the lexicon

The number of domains involved (inter-domain vs intra-domain mappings)

an important point of difference between metaphor and metonymy observed by cognitive linguists has to do with whether the mapping takes place across distinct conceptual domains or within a single domain (or ICM = idealized cognitive model, also
called script, scenario, or frame in cognitive linguistic literature)
the standard view is that a metonymic mapping occurs within a single domain, while
metaphoric mappings take place across two discrete domains
the differences between the two types of mappings can be presented schematically as
follows:

metaphorical mapping

metonymic mapping

Figure 1. Metaphor and metonymy distinguished on the basis of the number of conceptual domains involved

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(From: Radden, Cognitive English Grammar, 2007)

however, in the case of metonymy, it is important to bear in mind that the single conceptual domain involved is structured by an ICM (Lakoff 1987: 288) and may exhibit
some internal complexity
it is thus possible, as Croft (1993: 348) points out, for metonymic mapping to occur
within a single domain matrix which involves a number of subdomains
in other words, metonymic mapping across different domains within a single domain
matrix, involving the conceptual effect of domain highlighting, is also possible

The direction and the number of mappings

as for the directionality of the two types of mappings, metaphors typically employ a
more concrete concept or domain as source in order to structure a more abstract concept or domain as target. In the majority of cases, elements from the physical world
are mapped onto the social and mental world
metaphorical mappings are normally unidirectional, and the source and target are not
reversible (cf. Kvecses 2002: 6)

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this is often referred as the Unidirectionality Hypothesis

the situation with metonymies is quite different, metonymic mappings can proceed in
either direction, from the more concrete part of the domain (subdomain) to the more
abstract one and the other way round
according to Radden and Kvecses (1999: 22),
[i]n principle, either of the two conceptual entities related may stand for the other,
i.e., unlike metaphor, metonymy is basically a reversible process.
this is quite obvious when we consider pairs of metonymies such as CAUSE-FOREFFECT (e.g. healthy complexion for the good state of health bringing about the ffect
of healthy complexion) and EFFECT-FOR-CAUSE (e.g. slow road for slow traffic resulting from the poor state of the road), GENERIC-FOR-SPECIFIC (the pill) and
SPECIFIC-FOR-GENERIC (aspirin), etc.
this means that Figure 1 could be modified in such a way that the mappings go the
other way (but of course not at the same time)
metaphors may work on the basis of a set of correspondences (though some may exploit only one), while metonymic mappings are based on a single correspondence (cf.
Ruiz de Mendoza and Pea 2002)
the differences between the two types of mappings can now be presented schematically as follows:

metaphorical mappings
metonymic mapping
Figure 2. Metaphor and metonymy distinguished on the basis of the number of conceptual mappings (correspondences) involved

Different functions of metaphor and metonymy?

metaphor and metonymy are said to have different functions
according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 36f) metaphor is principally a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding;
while metonymy has primarily a referential function, that is, it allows us to use one
entity to stand for another
this difference is typically reflected in their realizations

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metaphors often function as predicative expressions (with an explicit or implicit verbal element), whereas metonymies function as nominal expressions, most commonly
functioning as subjects and objects
both metaphor and metonymy involve a certain amount of inferential work (recall
that metaphors are often informally considered to be shortened similes, i.e. two entities are brought into correlation as exhibiting some similarity, but there are no function words that would make this comparison explicit): something is described by
mentioning another thing with which it is assumed to implicitly share some features
hat is meant by inferential work boils down to the following: some points of similarity may be easier to establish, i.e. some correspondences will be easier to make, but
some such correspondences require more intellectual effort on the part of the
speaker/hearer, of course keeping in mind the Invariance Hypothesis and the constraints it imposes, but when a number of such correspondences are established, the
target domain may appear in a fairly new light
this is why metaphor is often considered as making possible a new way of seeing
things, and thus of understanding them
what is more, a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of
the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10)
the metaphorical structuring is always partial and never complete, because if it were
complete one concept would actually be the other, and not just be understood in
terms of the other concept. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 13)
as for the nature of the metonymic mapping, Kvecses and Radden (1998: 39) aptly
note that it 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 [Idealized Cognitive Model]
one of the most important aspects of this definition is that metonymy provides mental
access to a conceptual entity that need not be otherwise readily and easily accessible
figuratively speaking, metonymy is an efficient mental shortcut making it possible
for us to refer to entities for which there are not current or convenient (in the sense of
being short and compact) linguistic expressions
some examples such:
(6)

a. The Kremlin has officially anointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin the official successor to Boris Yeltsin, and the war in Chechnya should ensure his
victory in the presidential election in June 2000.
b. He flew to Amsterdam expecting the IKEA reps to be corporate suits,
c. Activists were emboldened by Seattle, and are no longer wary of taking on
complex industries.

because the Kremlin is the area in Moscow in which government buildings are concentrated, it has been traditionally used to refer metonymically to the centre of political power in the former USSR and Russia
in the second example, exhibiting OBJECT-FOR-USER-OF-THE-OBJECT metonymy (cf.
Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which is a very common subtype of a more general PARTFOR-WHOLE metonymy, the property of wearing a certain type of suits is such a sali-

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ent feature of businessmen that it almost functions as a stereotype identifying the

type of people who would wear them
the conceptual domain within which the mapping takes place is explicitly named in
the nominal expression IKEA reps
in (6) c., we have what Radden and Kvecses (1999: 41f) call PLACE-FOR-EVENT metonymy based on a Location ICM: the complex package of encyclopaedic knowledge, viz. the events both at and around one of the meetings of the worlds most influential businessmen and politicians that took place in Seattle in 1999, and especially the violent demonstrations against globalization, is compressed by means of
metonymy into a single proper noun
while Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 36f) see metonymy as having primarily referential
function they are aware of its additional functions
they point out not only that metonymy is naturally suited for focussing (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980: 37ff), but that it can just like metaphor have a role in construal, in
other words in making it possible for us to see and understand things in alternative
ways:
But metonymy is not merely a referential device. It also serves the function
of providing understanding. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36)

metonymy is often used for understanding in a slightly different sense, i.e. not so
much for highlighting as in a more radical sense of providing a conceptual handle or
window on a concept that would be otherwise quite difficult to conceptualize and
lexicalize
a fairly drastic example of this comes from the special language of the military,
where according to Oxford English Dictionary one of the (now obsolete) meanings
of horse is:
(7)

3. Mil. A horse and his rider; hence a cavalry soldier.

a. In sing., with pl. horses. Obs. rare.
1548 HALL Chron., Edw. IV 231 The Duke..came in no small hast.. onely accompaignied with sixtene horses. Ibid., Hen. VIII 32 The kyng contynually
sent foorth his light horses to seke the country.
b. Collective pl. horse: Horse soldiers, cavalry. light horse: see quot. 1853, and
LIGHT-HORSE.
1548 HALL Chron., Hen. IV 13 King Henry..with a fewe horse in the night,
came to the Tower of London. 1549 Compl. Scot. xi. 89 He furnest..tua hundretht lycht horse. 1597 SHAKES. 2 Hen. IV, II. i. 186 Fifteene hundred Foot,
fiue hundred Horse Are march'd vp. 1698 Lond. Gaz. No. 3445/1 First marched
an Alai Beg with about 50 Horse. 1777 ROBERTSON Hist. Amer. (1783) I.
157 The body..consisted only of two hundred foot, twenty horse, and
twenty..Indians. 1853 STOCQUELER Milit. Encycl., Light horse, all mounted
soldiers that are lightly armed and accoutred, for active and desultory service.
Thus light dragoons, fencible cavalry, mounted yeomanry, etc. are, strictly
speaking, light horse.

however, there are many less exotic examples where the presence of a metonymy is
hardly ever noticed, cf. the following set of examples we have descriptions of a person placing a candle on a table:

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61

a. Magdalen lit a candle. What notice must I give you, she asked, as she put
the candle on the table, before I leave?
b. Can I put the candle on the table? Will you light it up for me?
c. She put the candle on the table, and taking her head between her hands sat
down to think.

according to standard dictionary definitions, candle is a source of artificial light made

of wax, tallow or similar solid fat formed in a cylindrical shape around a wick of cotton or flax
dictionary definitions do not mention not any candle stick or candle holder as part of
a candle, i.e. they do not record any metonymic uses of the PART-FOR-WHOLE type,
where candle would refer to the whole of the functional unit consisting of a candle
and its holder
note that the above examples could be actually interpreted as being about a candle
without any holder, but it is more likely that both a candle and a holder are involved
in the latter case, we then have a PART-FOR-WHOLE metonymy that goes virtually unnoticed because it is subconscious, but is very useful indeed
there is simply no ready-made label for the functional unit consisting of two parts,
and specifying the parts of the unit, say by means of a coordinating construction, on
every occasion we mean the unit would be too cumbersome and perhaps make the
speaker and the listener aware of the existence of the functional unit in conceptual
terms, i.e. raising their consciousness, which might be a side-effect of the lexicalization, would certainly place additional burden, however small, on working memory
resources and slow down online processing, and possibly other cognitive processes
that might be running.

5.2. Types of metonymy

a number of typologies of metonymies were proposed in the past
Ullmann (1962: 218f) thus classifies metonymies according to the associations underlying them
some metonymies are based on spatial relations, some on temporal ones, and among
other relations which result in metonymic change, there is also pars pro toto or part
for whole type
several recent significant contributions to a cognitively based typology of metonymies, such as Kvecses and Radden (1998), Radden and Kvecses (1999), Panther
and Thornburg (1999: 335f), Seto (1999), and Blank (1999)
a crucial aspect of the cognitive linguistic approach to metonymy is that the phenomenon is not reduced to just one type of mapping, i.e. to the whole for part mapping
it also subsumes the traditional synecdoche, i.e. part for whole mapping, and includes
a third mapping where part stands for another part within the same domain or Idealized Cognitive Model
according to Ken-ichi Seto (1999:98), there are different kinds of metonymy,
depending not only on the kinds of entities (spatial, temporal and abstract), but also

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on the types of reference, i.e., the way one entity refers to another (whole-part,
container-contents, process-result, etc.)

spatial entities are understood in the sense of physical entities which have spatial
extention
there are two major subtypes: the whole-part (e.g. He picked up the telephone,
meaning the receiver) and the container-content type, which is different from the
whole-part type, because the container does not refer to the container plus the
contents, but only to the contents as far as the reference is concerned. (e.g. The kettle
is boiling, where the kettle can refer to the water in it, or the content of the kettle.)
however, examples like I had to go to the underground streets to find a vacant meter,
will resist a neat classification: vacant modifies the parking space next to the space
adjacent to it, between the meter and the space is neither a whole-part nor a
container-contents relation, but a relation characterized by the spatial contiguity
between the two entities
temporal entities are divided into two categories: one is based on the relation
between a whole event and a subevent and the other on the relation between a
preceding and an ensuing situation
e.g. in He is reading for the first degree, reading is a part of studying, which is
supposed to be part of being a university student, and is therefore a subevent for the
whole event of "being an undergraduate student")
the preceding-ensuing type of metonymy is processual
e.g. in I feel fiercly proud of my mother for standing up for her righteous neighbour
the preceding event of standing up, which means "rising to an upright posture" is
often a prerequisite for doing some activity, therefore, standing up metonimically
implies that the mother did something positive for her righteous neighbours
abstract entities are typically salient properties of a thing
although there are some properties perceptually so vivid that it may hardly seem right
to call them abstract, they can however become abstract in the sense that they are not
bounded by either space or time. (e.g. She was considered a great beauty in her
youth
Ungerer and Schmid (1996:115) imply that metonymy involves a relation of a word
and its figurative counterpart and based on that differentiate among several types of
contiguity-relations in metonymies:
PART FOR WHOLE (all hands on deck)
WHOLE FOR PART (to fill up the car)

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CONTAINER FOR CONTENT (I'll have a glass)

MATERIAL FOR OBJECT (a glass, an iron)
PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT (buy a Ford)
PLACE FOR INSTITUTION (talks between Washington and Moscow)
PLACE FOR EVENT (Watergate changed our politics)
CONTROLLED FOR CONTROLLER (the buses are on strike)
CAUSE FOR EFFECT (his native tongue is German)
Radden and Kvecses (1999: 28) talk about the interaction of ontological realms and
metonymy
according to them, metonymy may occur wherever we have idealized cognitive
models (ICMs)
as a matter of fact, we have ICMs of everything that is conceptualized, which includes the conceptualization of things and events, word forms and their meanings,
and things and events in the real world
they refer to these types of conceptualization as ontological realms
ICMs may also interrelate ontological realms
Radden and Kvecses (1999) distinguish three ontological realms:
o the world of concepts,
o the world of forms (of language) and
o the world of things and events

the interrelation between entities from the same realm or from different ontological
realms lead to various ICMs and possibilities for metonymy
however, we have to differentiate between ICMs which interrelate entities of different ontological realms within the same semiotic unit and ICMs which interrelate entities of different semiotic units within the same ontological realm or realms
in other words, there are sign metonymies, reference metonymies, and concept metonymies
the situation of interrelated ontological realms gives rise to two ICMs:
o Sign ICM, (1) which can be described as pairing of a concept and a form, and
o Reference ICM (2-4), which is a pairing of a thing or event and a sign, form or
concept
the Sign ICM unites a form and one or more concepts
the form metonymically stands for the concept it denotes
since we have no other means of expressing and communicating our concepts than
by using forms, language as well as other communication systems are of necessity
metonymic, e.g. (1) FORM FOR CONCEPT: dollar for "money"

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the Sign ICM leads only to form for concept metonymy, not to the reverse metonymy
of concept for form
the situation of interrelated semiotic units involves concepts in conjunction with
forms and we refer to these ICMs as Concept ICMs (5)
as the picture shows, there are three types of Reference ICMs and possible
metonymies
the situation of reference involves signs, i.e., the form-concept units, which stand for
a thing or event referred to
o FORM-CONCEPT FOR THING/EVENT: word cow for a real cow
o CONCEPT FOR THING/EVENT: concept "cow" for a real cow
o FORM FOR THING/EVENT: word-form cow for a real cow
concept metonymies involve a shift from ConceptA to ConceptB, which may be
accompanied by a shift in form
o FORM-CONCEPTA FOR FORMB-CONCEPTB: bus-"bus" for bus drivers-"bus
drivers" (This type involves the relationship between two form-concept pairings:
the word-form and its associated concept, buses, is used in place of another
conventional form-concept unit, bus drivers.)
o FORM-CONCEPTA FOR CONCEPTB: mother "mother" for "housewifemother"
o FORMA-CONCEPTA FOR FORMA-CONCEPTB: White House-"place" for
White House-"institution" (This metonymic situation applies to polysemy, in
which two senses of a word-form are relatable within the same ICM)
o FORMA-CONCEPTA FOR FORMB-CONCEPTA: UN for United Nations (in
this metonymic situation the form of an expression changes while the concept
roughly stays the same. This metonymy applies to reductions of form such as
abbreviations, acronyms, clippings and so on).
since our knowledge about the world is organized by structured ICMs which we perceive in terms of wholes with parts, the difference between the wholes and parts is of
great importance for metonymic processes
Radden and Kvecses list the types of metonymy-producing relationships under two
general conceptual configurations:
(i) whole ICM and its part(s); this configuration gives rise to metonymies in which
we access a part of an ICM via its whole or a whole ICM via one of its parts
(ii) parts of an ICM which may lead to metonymies in which we access a part via
another part of an ICM (the whole ICM is still implicitly present in the background)
within both types there are numerous subtypes according to the type of ICM
the whole ICM and its part(s) configuration may involve
o Thing-and-Part ICM,
o Scale ICM,
o the Constitution ICM,
o the Event ICM, etc.
the parts of an ICM configuration may involve
o Action ICM,
o Perception ICM,
o Causation ICM,
o Production ICM,

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o Location ICM, etc.

practically all of these can come in further more specific subtypes, depending on
which parts of the ICM are involved
e.g. Thing-and-Part ICM may lead to two metonymic variants, WHOLE THING FOR A
PART OF THE THING (America for United States), and the PART OF A THING FOR THE
WHOLE THING (England for Great Britain)
pragmatic typology of metonymies (Panther and Thornburg 1999: 335f)
propositional metonymy
o referential metonymy
o predicational metonymy
illocutionary metonymy
within the framework of a pragmatic typology of metonymies proposed in Panther
and Thornburg (1999: 335f), expressions like the ones highlighted in (9-10) are characterized as instances of propositional metonymy
propositional metonymies come in two subtypes: in a referential metonymy, exemplified in (9), one referring expression, usually a noun phrase, is the vehicle for an
implied target that is also a referring expression normally realized as a noun phrase;
in a predicational metonymy, illustrated in (10) below, one propositional content
stands for another propositional content
the third type of discourse-pragmatic metonymy, extensively discussed in Thornburg
and Panther (1997) and Panther and Thornburg (1998), is illocutionary metonymy
where one illocutionary act stands for another illocutionary act, as in (11)
(9) a.

Most successful is the Guggenheim, which operates flourishing satellites in

Venice, Berlin and, most recently, Bilbao, Spain. That branch, which
opened in 1997, has proved highly lucrative, both for the Guggenheim and
for Spain. In addition to spending $100 million to build the museum, the
Basque regional government paid the Guggenheim a one-time fee of $20
million and subsidizes the Bilbaos $ 12 million annual budget. But the returns on that investment have been substantial; in the 18 months since the
Bilbao opened, tourism in the Basque region has increased by 28 percent.
b. Only one in eight M.P. is Westminster is a woman, but this is because British antidiscrimination laws bar the party from stacking its lists of parliamentary candidates in womens favor.

(10) a. Well, look, I mean, abortion is an issue where Governor Bush has been
pretty clear.
b. My first concern in attacking a town garden is to be quite clear as to the result I am after.
c. Karolyi, whose Belanese riffs on the English language can be unfathomable,
was clear about the benefits of a more uniform training approach and a
more homogenized national style, as in champion Romania.
(11) a. If I may be allowed a topical rugby metaphor, we had, so to speak lined up
the ball for a conversion.

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b. The trouble with cricket bats, if I may be allowed a brief digression, is that
they are really only good for swatting.
c. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them,
they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be
pardoned the barbarous expression, that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
Activity 5.2. Read carefully the following paragraphs and try to spot all the various metonymies in it. Comment on the type of mapping and the domains involved.
Sen. Robert Byrd is now calling for a road map out of Iraq and mournfully alludes to
the echoes of Vietnam. Another liberal warhorse has weighed in, too. Iraq is George
Bushs Vietnam, said Sen. Edward Kennedy. Iraq has developed into a quagmire.
Measured objectively, the comparison to Vietnam is something of a stretch. That war
dragged on for more than a decade and cost 50,000 lives. There were times during the
Vietnam War when America was losing 500 men a week. A year in, the death total in
Iraq stands at 458 soldiers killed in action. In some ways, a more accurate analogy
might be to Lebanon, where Israel plunged into a power vacuum of feuding religious
factions during the 1980s and was trapped in a hellhole of bombings and kidnappings.
Last week Islamic extremists in Iraq began hijacking foreign civilians, including three
Japanese, and appeared to capture and hold hostage several American contractors. Bush
could face a full-fledged hostage crisisand confront the sort of dilemma Jimmy Carter
did in Iran in 1980.
And yet to most Americans, Vietnam is the recurring nightmare. To anyone over the age
of about 50, last week felt a little like the end of February 1968, when the Tet offensive
was raging through the cities of South Vietnam and Americans were starting to wonder
if the war would ever end. A year after Iraqi civilians (with the help of U.S. Marines)
toppled Saddams statue, America suffered through its worst week of combat since the
supposed end of the war, with more than 40 soldiers dead and hundreds more wounded.
During Tet, a Viet Cong suicide squad penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon before being gunned down. Nothing quite that dramatic happened in Baghdad. Yet Paul
Bremer, the American proconsul, had to cancel an appointment on the edge of the socalled Green Zone, where the Americans are headquartered, when security forces found
an unexploded bomb possibly waiting for his arrival.
Though Senator Byrd got a little carried away with his prediction that Iraq would turn
into a debacle of epic proportions (he recited The Charge of the Light Brigade on the
Senate floor), and Senator Kennedy is, well, Senator Kennedy, there are, indeed, uncomfortable echoes of Vietnam in Iraq. So far they are heard mostly by the chattering
classes. One significant difference between now and thenno drafthas kept down
dissent in the heartland. Even so, it is possible to lay Iraq and Vietnam side by side and
see disturbing parallels, as well as critical differencesboth of which shed light on
what must be done going forward.
For all the tremendous reforms by the military since Vietnam, the battlefield challenges
are eerily similar. The generals are still torn between winning hearts and minds with
soccer games and reconstruction projectsand going in hammer-and-tongs to obliterate
the enemy. The experience of the Marines is illustrative. For most of the occupation in
Iraq, the Marines regarded the U.S. Army as too heavy-handed. With its emphasis on

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heavy armor, the Army liked to stand back and bombard the enemy from afar with artillery and tanks. The Marines, by contrast, preferred to go in lightto make friends
while patrolling the streets, even taking off the dark glasses that many Arabs find offensive.
The leathernecks are now finding, however, that the desert can be as deadly and confusing as the jungle. Because the Marines sent most of their tanks home, they found themselves badly missing their armor when Fallujah blew up last week (and even had to suffer the indignity of asking the Army to loan a few tanks). When Marines came under
fire from a mosque, they had to call in an airstrike. A 500-pound bomb dropped from a
jet, even a satellite-guided smart bomb, is a blunter instrument than a tank shell. Arablanguage TV claimed that the bomb killed more than a score of civilians at prayer (a
claim rejected by a Marine spokesman).

5.3. Metonymy and motivation in grammar

MANNER-FOR-ACTIVITY

metonymy

while both metaphor and metonymy are recognized in cognitive linguistics as basic
processes, it is remarkable that they have been seen as playing very different roles in
the organization of the grammatical component
metaphorical extensions are extensively assumed to have taken place in almost all
areas of grammar, making it possible to account for scores of phenomena in an intuitively appealing way
it has often been noted that, unlike metaphor, metonymy has hardly any impact on
grammar. This type of claim has almost invariably been made on the basis of a discussion of referential or nominal metonymies (cf. Nunberg 1979, 1995, Copestake
and Briscoe 1995). There are two problems with such claims
firstly, it is not immediately clear what is meant by impact on grammar, or by
grammatical corollaries, as Copestake and Briscoe (1995: 16) put it
secondly, while it is true that linguists have so far paid much less attention to metonymy than to metaphor in general, a shift in the focus of interest, or at least a first step
towards establishing a sort of balance between these two programmes of cognitive
research in terms of awareness, the energy invested, and the breadth and depth of research efforts, has recently become noticeable, chiefly towards the end of 1990s
(there is by now a rapidly growing body of literature that convincingly shows that
metonymic processes are crucially involved in shaping central areas of grammar, e.g.
Panther and Thornburg (1999, 2000, forthcoming), as well as to works by Ruiz de
Mendoza and his collaborators (Ruiz de Mendoza 1999, Ruiz de Mendoza and Pea
Cervel 2002, Ruiz de Mendoza and Prez Hernndez 2001), Barcelona (2004), and
Radden and Dirven (2007))
metonymy need not in fact bring about any spectacular changes or shifts in grammar,
but may still play an important role in motivating whole grammatical subsystems, i.e.
in motivating the distribution of elements and their division of labour, e.g. a number
of nominal expressions are ambivalent regarding whether their referents are to be
construed as uniplex/unitary or multiplex entities
the grammatical import of metonymies is indeed often less than genuinely spectacular

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it is rather the case that metonymy manifests itself in the nitty-gritty grammatical details, as shown by the following series of examples
constraints on referential metonymy seem at first sight to be less heavily grammatical
in nature than those observed with predicational metonymy
however, this does not mean at all that referential metonymies are totally uninteresting from a grammatical point of view
cf. the following examples from the screenplay of Annie Hall by Woody Allen:
(12) Theres Henry Drucker. He has a chair in history at Princeton.
Oh, the short man is Hershel Kaminsky. He has a chair in philosophy at Cornell.
here the referring expression chair is used to substitute for another referring expression, something like the position of being in charge of a university department
it is a lexicalized metonymy since its meaning has become conventionalized and is
part of the mental lexicon of a sizeable number of native speakers of English (and is
therefore recorded in most dictionaries of English)
the etymology of the word and the source of the metonymic relationship, ultimately
deriving from Latin cathedra, are actually lost on many people using it
the lexical item chair is used in its literal sense to refer to an article of household furniture, i.e. a movable four-legged seat with a rest for the back
the word entered the language around 1300, judging from the first written records
cited in Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
according to the same source, the word was as early as 1325 used to refer to a seat of
authority, state or dignity, more or less throne-like
this pre-metonymic use clearly shows that the physical object is now associated in
some situations with the properties of the person habitually occupying it
this is quickly followed by a use recognized by OED as figurative
the records starting from 1382 onwards show that the word is also used metonymically to refer to a place or situation of authority, in the presence or absence of the
physical object used as a furniture item
the literal sense of the word also shows specialization: around the middle of the 15th
century it is used to refer to the seat in a church occupied by a bishop, and hence also
episcopal authority or dignity
at roughly the same time, the word is being used to refer to the seat from which a
professor or other authorized teacher delivers his lectures
according to OED, the meaning of chair we see exemplified in (12) above, the office
or position of a professor, appears only later, the first written records stemming from
1816 and onwards, but we may assume, on the strength of analogical evidence that it
was in use much earlier
but the word is used in another secondary metonymic sense in (13) below:
(13) Annual income from the fund is to be distributed by the chair and his/her
departmental colleagues in any way appropriate to support and encourage
superior work by staff and students in the geological sciences.

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the lexical item is here used to refer to the occupant of chair, as invested with its dignity and/or authority
first records for this use in OED appear around 1658
note that this secondary metonymic use has certain grammatical consequences
because the expression is now used to denote a personal referent, pronouns used anaphorically must also indicate this fact, hence his/her determining departmental colleagues, and not its
in other words, metonymy determines the gender class of a noun and also the choice
of appropriate anaphors
the very same lexical item can be used in another metonymic sense which also has
some interesting grammatical aspects
according to OED, in the special register of glass-making industry, chair can be used
to refer to the gang of men consisting of the glass-blower and his assistants, due to
the fact that the lexeme is used in this industrial context to refer to a seat-like contraption in which a glass-blower sits
this seat is furnished with long arms upon which the glass-blower rolls the pontil
cf. the following examples from OED:
(14) a. 1897 Worc. County Express 3 Apr., There were ten chairs at the works, each
occupied by a glassmaker, servitor, and footmaker.
b. 1902 Bham Daily Post 2 Apr., Eighty is the limit number of strawstem
wineglasses to be made in six hours by a chair, which consists of three
men and a boy.
c. 1962 Gloss. Terms Glass Ind. (B.S.I.) 23 Chair, a special long-armed chair
in which the craftsman sits when shaping glass. Ibid. 45 Chair, a team or
gang of workers producing blown or pressed glassware by hand.
in this use the noun should clearly count as a collective noun, which again has
consequences for the range of possible anaphors
needless to say, the word chair can also be used as a verb to indicate the activity of
presiding over a body of people, acting as a chair, etc.
according to Dirven (1999), such cases of conversion, i.e. of change of the
grammatical category of the word accompanied by meaning shifts can also be
considered to be the result of metonymy
some other metonymies have become conventionalized without shedding the transparent link between metonymic and non-metonymic meaning, e.g. the names of localities and buildings used to refer to a whole range of metonymic targets ranging
from governments or other political bodies, to institutions, to events
the following example from a TV show contains an interesting example of the name
of a well-known building used to refer to several possible targets:
(15) Well, the question was, has Buckingham Palace reacted to this book.
No, no, they havent.
I dont suppose that they will, Im afraid.
(CNN, Larry King Live, Royal Family Gossip, Aired August 14, 2001- 21:00
ET)

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Buckingham Palace is the Queens official office and residence in London, but this
place name is very frequently used to refer to the whole royal family, or to the whole
court (but normally not just to the monarch)
as in (14) above, we again have an expression that is used metonymically to a collective, and is treated as such in terms of anaphoric reference. In the following examples
retrieved through Google, the expression in question, functioning as subject, also
takes plural verbs:
(16) a. Buckingham Palace are holding crisis talks this morning after discovering
that Prince Charles is not actually the Prince of Wales after all.
(www.mirror.co.uk/bigbrother/messageboard/tm_objectid=17085425&meth
od=m2_msg_full&siteid=94762&...)
b. Buckingham Palace are hosting a childrens party in celebration of the
Queens 80th birthday and High Position have been chosen as the official
optimiser.
(www.londonbreaks.com/sightseeing/buckinghampalace.html)
the conceptual category of plexity, with the opposition between uniplex and
multiplex, underlies singular/plural and semelfactive/iterative distinctions with nouns
and verbs, respectively
the category has to do with a quantitys state of articulation into equivalent elements
if the quantity consists of only one such element, it is uniplex and where it
consists of more than one, it is multiplex (Talmy 1978: 17).
cases of alternative construals resting on metonymic mappings involving certain
substances and the artifacts made from that substance on the one hand, and nouns
denoting individuated entities such as animals, trees and other plants related
metonymically to edible or proccessable substances derived from these individuated
entities, on the other
in cognitive linguistics this phenomenon of coercion or the imposition of the
alternative construal is seen as made possible by metonymic mappings
it is treated as a subtype of the general PART-FOR-WHOLE metonymy, specifically as
MATERIAL-FOR-OBJECT-MADE-OF-THE-MATERIAL and its reverse, OBJECT-FORMATERIAL-CONSTITUTING-THE-OBJECT, both within the Constitution ICM (cf. Radden
and Kvecses 1999: 32)
he former metonymy, MATERIAL-FOR-OBJECT-MADE-OF-THE-MATERIAL, is quite
productive in English, as shown by the fact that numerous lexical items that
primarily denote substances, e.g. lexemes for metals, which are inherently non-count,
can be used to refer to a whole range of objects made of that metal. Cf. the following
series of examples with silver. In (17), the lexeme is used to refer to substance, but in
(18) we note a metonymic shift whereby the noun comes to denote some unspecified
piece of that metal, which Oxford English Dictionary (OED) glosses as a piece or
strip of silver.
(17) a. Silver is the top pick for 2007 but trade carefully
If 2007 proves to be a stormy year in financial markets, as this column
predicted last week, then precious metals look the most solid investment

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choice. However, precious metals would likely also tumble in a global

capital market sell-off, along with oil and other commodity prices.
b. But industrial silver is used for its physical properties, corrosion resulting in
failures; in museums, when corrosion products change the visual appearance
of the art objects, they also form a protective coating, slowing down the
corrosion process.
(18)

They are connected, all the zincs by one wire, and all the silvers by another
wire.

in addition to (18), OED lists silver as having a series of derived meanings

it can be used in the sense of silver medal, silver coin (which is further
metonymically extended to mean price of something in silver), silver thread:
(19)

a. To have won one gold medal and two silvers in those Games was not only
phenomenal, it was historic.
b. The only US gold coins that he has are a 1883 $20, an 1898 $10, an 1897 $5
and some silvers that we still need to sort through.

silver, sometimes pure, but more usually as alloy, i.e. mixed with other metals, is
used to produce a range of jewelry and valuable household items
even the artifacts made from materials other than silver but which have a silver
coating or plating layer on object are referred to as silver(s):
(20)

a. Too much polishing can wear down the finish on some silvers. Items which
are coated or plated should be washed by hand often and polished only once
or twice per year. As long as silver is cleansed regularly and stored properly,
theres no need to polish silver more than once a year.
b. Dip your silvers (jewellery, cutlery, etc. ) in water used for boiling potatoes.
Wash with soap after an hour. This will bring back the sparkle.

in the domain of colours (colour being a very salient property of this metal) silver
can be used to refer to silver tincture (in heraldry), or silvery colour or lustre:
(21) DEEP Chocolate beauties should steer clear of ashy shades (light pinks, pale
blues, some silvers) that leave behind a fake frosty finish. Warm it up with 1.
Becca Eye Colour Shimmer in Jacquard;
we also note an elliptical use of silver to refer to salt of silver, or silver nitrate, in
photography
this should nevertheless be considered metonymic, because silver is conceptually, if
not chemically speaking, the more important component due to the final appearance
of the print with the colour resembling silver:
(22) Then in a chemically dark room, mix the collodion and silver, stirring as the
mixture is poured into the bottle intended for its reception.

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probably the most exotic use of silver, clearly a metonymic shift based on the colour
aspect of silver, is to refer to particular varieties of various animals, fish and insects
that have silvery colour or markings making them distinct from other (sub)varieties.
cf. some examples of this use:
(23)

a. The exquisite silvers are considered the most ethereal of all Persians.
b. There are two very different silver salmon this month. Early in the month,
trolling the deep cold waters off Admiralty and Shelter Island and Icy Strait,
we find huge schools of silvers, running from a few feet to a few hundred
feet deep, following the schools of bait on the way to those creeks where
they will eventually spawn and die.
c. June bugs with panache, jewel scarabs come in colors that rival gemstones.
Heat and humidity during their development may influence color: Some
green species produce a pink form, and some silvers turn gold.

reversing the direction of metonymic mappings involving an object and the material,
we arrive at the OBJECT-FOR-MATERIAL-CONSTITUTING-THE-OBJECT within Radden
and Kvecses Constitution ICM (1999: 32)
some lexical items labelling the concept of the whole animal may stand only for a
particular aspect of the whole animal, i.e. its bodily substance/flesh/meat as
processed and used as foodstuff
even literally, the substance that we use as food is only part of the whole animals
body, as animals are skinned, boned, etc., and usually it is not the whole carcass that
is meant, but rather some smaller portion of it
the term animal grinding has been used to refer to specific type of the phenomenon
variably called logical metonymy, logical polysemy, or regular polysemy (cf.
Copestake and Briscoe 1995, Gillon 1999, Pustejovsky and Bouillon 1995), i.e. to
those cases in which one and the same label can be used to refer holistically to the
animal species or specimen as well as to the flesh of the animal in question, not
necessarily conceived of as foodstuff, i.e. as meat of that animal, as illustrated in the
following examples:
(24) a. I would not eat cat, he murmurs.
b. We did not always eat turkey for Christmas dinner.
there is no doubt that the referents designated by lexical items cat and turkey (and
most other names animals) are inherently bounded
consequently, the lexical items used to label these concepts are treated as intrinsically
countable
however, unbounded construals can be coerced onto most of them, as seen in our two
examples above.
the noun is now reclassified in grammatical terms as a concrete but non-count, mass
noun (this is sometimes designated partial conversion, cf. Quirk et al. 1985)
the metonymic mappings have as their grammatical consequence the possibility of
using these nouns with non-default determiners, such as zero article, or quantifiers
such as some or little

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this contrasts with the majority of nouns denoting animals used in their primary
sense, where they are countable, capable of overtly indicating plural at both token
and type/species level (though there are some notorious exceptions, e.g. fish, which
is capable of taking plural only at the type/species level)
their countable status is indicated by the fact that they may take the whole range of
determiners, indefinite, definite, and zero, if pluralized
replacing the verb eat by a verb such as kill in (9) a. and b., would result in reversing
the grinding construal, and cat taking a definite or an indefinite article, and turkey
probably taking the indefinite article:
(25) a. I would not kill a/the cat, he murmurs.
b. We did not always kill a turkey for Christmas dinner.

Activity 5.3. Read carefully the first paragraph from 5.2., repeated below and try to spot
all the various metaphors in it. Comment on the domains involved. Comment on cases
in which metaphors and metonymies interact?
Sen. Robert Byrd is now calling for a road map out of Iraq and mournfully alludes to
the echoes of Vietnam. Another liberal warhorse has weighed in, too. Iraq is George
Bushs Vietnam, said Sen. Edward Kennedy. Iraq has developed into a quagmire.
Measured objectively, the comparison to Vietnam is something of a stretch. That war
dragged on for more than a decade and cost 50,000 lives. There were times during the
Vietnam War when America was losing 500 men a week. A year in, the death total in
Iraq stands at 458 soldiers killed in action. In some ways, a more accurate analogy
might be to Lebanon, where Israel plunged into a power vacuum of feuding religious
factions during the 1980s and was trapped in a hellhole of bombings and kidnappings.
Last week Islamic extremists in Iraq began hijacking foreign civilians, including three
Japanese, and appeared to capture and hold hostage several American contractors. Bush
could face a full-fledged hostage crisisand confront the sort of dilemma Jimmy Carter
did in Iran in 1980.
Activity 5.4. Translate the following:
a. It was therefore a bombshell when Oswald Avery and colleagues at the Rockefeller
Institute demonstrated in 1944 that it was the DNA which carried the genetic message.
b. Bens a real fruit-cake turning down that offer for his bike.
c. On je tek sitna riba u usporedbi s njegovim pretpostavljenima.
d. On je udna ptica.
e. Srela je svoju davnu ljubav.
f. Ostao je jo traak nade.
g. My secretary is an absolute gem.
Activity 5.5. Which part of the house is meant as the active zone of the metonymy in the
following examples?
a. Im having the house painted.

Part 2: Motivation in language

74

b. Have you locked the house?

c. He entered the house.
d. Im cleaning the house.
e. They are having an open house today.
Activity 5.6. Identify the conceptual metonymies in the following italicised expressions.
a. He drank the whole bottle.
b. Arthur married money.
c. Einstein was one of the most creative minds of the last century.
d. There are too many mouths to feed.
e. Own land in the great American West. (advertisement)
f. Brussels has been negotiating with Boeing for months.
g. My wife has been towed away.
h. Where are you parked?
Activity 5.7. Specify whether the metonymic expressions below are of the type
FOR-WHOLE, WHOLE-FOR-PART or of the type PART-FOR-PART.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.

PART-

Did you hear the whistle?

She is my joy
She married money.
Bob spent last summer in America.
Cambridge wont publish the book.
The car needs washing.
He is an experienced farm hand.
Bush attacked Saddam.
Hold your tongue.
He spends too much time in front of the tube.

Activity 5.8. Complete the following expressions with metonymically used body part
nouns from the list. Determine the type of metonymy in question.
face
heart

nose
arm

ear
tongue

mouth(s)
lip

teeth
head

neck
blood

1 She has a very nasty ______________. She can quarrel and say mean things.
2 The law must have _____________ and must be enforced.
3 You wont have to think, just follow your ___________.
4 I wont have him risking his _____________ on that motorcycle.
5 His good looks won him the election but he has still to prove that he's not just a pretty
_____________.
6 Theres a lot of bad _______________ between those two families.
7 The Giants need a stronger ________________ in right field.
8 Most of the crowned ___________ of Europe have been entertained in this palace.
9 He had a keen _________. No movement could escape him.
10 Dont make me write it again! Have a _____________!
11 I have five ______________ to feed at home.
12 Dont give me any of your _________________!

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Unit 4: Metonymy as a motivating factor

Activity 5.9. Complete the following sentences with appropriate metonymically motivated exocentric compounds from the list.
bluecoat
blue stocking

blockhead
egghead

butterfingers
bigmouth

dimwit
Redcoat(s)

1 Beyond the crease he also had no delusions of grandeur. He was not the __________
he was often labelled after his colourful outbursts.
2 What he got was an integrated cooperative run by an elected board and what the
newspapers at the time described as an ______________ community full of academics, federal workers and diplomats.
3 Harley could hardly do better than to have Shanghai's cops keep the peace atop their
distinctive made-in-America cruisers. In a best-case scenario, Shanghais
________________ would set in motion a domino effect of urban change, from Beijing to Guangzhou, led by a fleet of gleaming Milwaukee iron.
4 And just as her husband scarcely fits the present Tory mould, so Gill Clarke is an untypical Tory wife. Instead she is held in some awe as a formidable _____________
with, according to one commentator, a tinge of Laura Ashley liberalism.
5 That's a holiday in Massachusetts and Maine called Patriots Day. It commemorates
the battles with the ________________ at Lexington and Concord.
6 The Games could have self-destructed after the disaster that was Munich and the flop
that was Moscow. But the International Olympic Committee, with the vision of a bat
and the common sense of a slug, was shown by capitalist Peter Ueberroth that even
nincompoops could make money from Olympics -- if all they want to do is make
money. The IOC - _______________ leading the ______________ - would like us to
believe all is well, because the foul institution thrives on dough, which, of course, has
led to corruption.
7 But before we can brag, we'll need to pick up tips from professionals. Tips that arent
complicated and that even a __________________ like me can handle.
8 There was a boy in my class who had made a fine art of being a poor victim through
two classes, acting the ________________, sitting dribbling, saying he couldnt do
any work. It was clear he was quite bright and I was determined to give him goals and
have expectations of him.
Activity 5.10. All the nouns in the following sets of examples are used in a figurative
context. Determine whether they, as well as the expressions they are part of, are used
metaphorically of metonymically.
a. gun
1 He was the sixth gun on the job.
2 You should stick to your guns
3 This is a job for a hired gun.
4 Do not jump the gun.
b. gold

Part 2: Motivation in language

1 She wore so much gold its no wonder she was mugged.

2 He is going to win the gold in Athens.
c. wheels
1 I dont have wheels, so Ill need a lift.
2 The wheel of fashion is every quicker.
3 After many hours at the wheel I was ready for a stop.

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