Metonymy as a Syntactic Strategy in Assigning Informational Prominence within the Noun Phrase

This paper shows how the syntactic strategies in assigning informational prominence in clause structures can be exploited in phrases. The thematic approach to phrases will shed clear light on the marked word order of elements in noun phrase (NP) and on how this allows increasing the degree of prominence of a component in NP. This is a general claim about different thematic strategies in NP which, we will argue, appear in examples of NPs marked by exchange of modifier-head syntactic functions, or by omission and supplantation of the head. We will concentrate on the latter, a case called “referential metonymy”. On the one hand, referential metonymy is better explained if considered as a syntactic strategy in assigning informational prominence and, on the other, it is a good example to illustrate the more general claim of thematization in the NP. These phrasal syntactic strategies are identified as such in context.