METONYMY, GRAMMAR AND COMMUNICATION

For a long time the study of metonymy has rated second best in comparison to the amount of effort devoted to the understanding of the closely related phenomenon of metaphor. This was the case in the work of ancient rhetoricians who thought of metonymy as a 'trope' or figure of speech. And it is also the general feeling that arises from a quick look at the literature produced by cognitive linguists about this topic. Within the cognitivist tradition, metonymy has been promoted from being regarded as a mere rhetorical figure to the status of a mental mechanism underlying many aspects of human conceptualization. In this, the relevance of metonymy as a cognitive strategy of knowledge organization is comparable to that of metaphor. Nevertheless, while metaphor has been discussed at length by cognitive linguists 1, metonymy has attracted a considerably smaller amount of attention. This phenomenon is treated rather briefly in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff and Turner (1989), Lakoff (1987), and Taylor (1995), where metonymy is set apart from metaphor, only to devote the largest part of the discussion to the latter. It is only in the 1990s, and particularly in the late 1990s, that metonymy has gradually started to awaken the interest of cognitive linguists, as is evidenced by the growing number of publications on the topic in those years. Among others, we may refer to the studies by Goossens (1990), Croft (1993), and Dirven (1993), and the collections of articles in Panther and Radden (1999), and in Barcelona (2000a). Little by little, metonymy has ceased to be the marginal topic that it once was. The pervasiveness of metonymic phenomena has even led some authors to postulate that it is often at the basis of metaphoric thinking (see Goossens, 1990; Taylor 1995; Barcelona, 2000b; and Niemeier, 2000). This is in agreement with the claims of some scholars who argue that metonymy occupies a more central role in our conceptual apparatus than granted so far.