WHAT IS METONYMY? THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS IN METONYMY RESEARCH (Mi a metonimia? Elmeletek es kiserletek a metonimiakutatasban)

• Authors: Bencze-M. Ildiko
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

For a long time metonymy was held to be a figure of speech in which a name of one concept is substituted for that of another closely associated concept. Compared to this, holistic cognitive linguistics re-evaluated the concept of metonymy. From this point of view metonymy is first of all a conceptual process, thus metonymic relations are in effect conceptual relations which characterize not only our language use but also our everyday life, thought and behaviour. However, many researchers think that the cognitive approach of metonymy is too general. In their opinion metonymic expressions are essentially elliptical structures, and they try to explain the phenomenon by studying the semantic structures of words, the syntactic structures of sentences, and pragmatic factors. For the present, results of psycholinguistic experiments which analyse how we comprehend metonymic expressions support both approaches. Accordingly, in the case of some metonymic types comprehension takes place through the activation of metonymic relations, while in other cases hearers (or readers) have to complement the elliptical linguistic structure. It seems that metonymy is a very complex phenomenon where besides the different metonymic types we have to consider various processing strategies.

Keywords

EN

CONCEPTUAL METONYMY; CONCEPTUAL RELATION; ELLIPSIS RULE; ENRICHED COMPOSITION; LOGICAL METONYMY; REGULAR POLYSEMY; SALIENCE; SEMANTICAL INCOMPATIBILITY

Discipline

• PSYCHOLOGY: PSYCHOLOGY

• Publisher: Hungarian Association for Psychology
• Journal: Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle (Hungarian Psychological Review)
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 677-696
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Bencze-M. Ildiko

• Ildiko Bencze-M., no address given, contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA074126