Where does metonymy stop? Senses, facets and active zones

Within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics both metonymy and metaphor are seen as pervasive phenomena in thought and language. They are, however, different conceptualizations of experience. Metaphorization, such as ‘Love is a journey’, involves the mapping between a source and a target in different ontological domains. Metaphorization is based on a relation of configurational sameness (PATH) and ontological difference (LOVE and JOURNEY). Metonymization, on the other hand, is based on contiguity and involves mapping and/or highlighting within one ontological domain, e.g. ‘There were a lot of new faces at the party’, where the notion of FACES relates to PEOPLE via conceptual association within the one and the same concept complex, i.e. that of PEOPLE. In other words, metaphor is based on a construal of comparison, while metonymy is a construal of salience. Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics is a reference-point phenomenon (Langacker 1999: 199) in that ‘the entity that is normally designated by a metonymic expression serves as a reference point affording mental access to the desired target, i.e. the entity actually being referred to. It is thereby also an activation phenomenon (Langacker 1987: 385-386). In contrast to the cognitive school of thought, the traditional objectivist approach makes different assumptions. Metonymy is a figure of speech that makes use of the name of one thing for that of something else with which it is associated, e.g. faces for people (The new Oxford dictionary of English: 1998: sub voce). Metonymies are language operations that concern names (words) of things (referents). The transfer of metonymy from a language phenomenon to metonymy as a cognitive process has caused some terminological cum definitional confusion. There are, however, two observations that traditionalists and cognitivists have in common. Firstly, there is some sort of discrepancy in the link between the conventional name for the referent and the referent itself, and, secondly, there is a contiguity relation between the two referents. 2 Both the aspects, i.e. the lexical side as well as the semantic side of the matter, are the focus of the present study. The analysis is substantiated by a corpus-based, empirical study of nominals in spoken English, in which the actual contextualized reading of a nominal makes the basis for the analysis.