Metonymy and Relevance

The aim of this paper is to reconsider the phenomena traditionally treated as cases of metonymy and to suggest a way of accounting for their production and comprehension. In the first half of the paper I critically review some previous attempts to deal with metonymy. I focus in particular on the classical approach, the associationist approach and the Gricean approach. The main point of my criticisms is that the notion of empirical associations among objects is in itself inadequate for a complete descriptive and explanatory account of metonymy. In the second part of the paper I formulate a new proposal for the pragmatics of metonymy. I argue that metonymy is a variety of echoic use and that its cognitive and communicative role can be very effectively treated by the general relevance-theoretic framework. I suggest that such an approach has two interesting consequences. First, it sheds new light on the relation between metonymy and metaphor. Second, it can naturally accommodate the fact that metonymy is not a natural class but rather a continuum of cases; these include novel, one-off uses, conventionalised metonymies understood via generalised pragmatic routines, and fully semanticised metonymies that have entered the lexicon.