parked out back? Odense Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 2, 363-387. The man, the key, or the car: Who or what is parked out back?

It is quite common in everyday language to hear sentences like (1)"I am parked out back" or (2)"He has a Picasso in his den". We can also easily imagine a situation where a waitress, speaking about a customer, says: (3)"The ham sandwich is at table 7" or a situation where a customer hands his key to an attendant at a parking lot and says: (4)"This is parked out back". All these expressions, (1)-(4), employ the mechanism of metonymy. Below we briefly review the treatment of metonymy in cognitive linguistics, contrasting it with the more referential treatment given by Nunberg (1995). Adapting conceptual integration or conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner: 1996, 1998, 2002; Turner and Fauconnier, 1999), we suggest that metonymy involves conceptual blending between the concept evoked by the trigger term (such as “Picasso” in (2)), and that evoked by the intended target (the particular piece of art referred to in the den in (2)). Following Langacker, we suggest that metonymy is a reference point construction and note that certain kinds of metonymies rely more heavily on context for their efficacy, and that this context-dependence is marked by definitive linguistic properties, and may affect the extent of trigger-target blending that occurs in a given metonymic expression.