Metonymy

Put simply, metonymy is a process whereby one entity or event is used to refer to another, related, entity or event. For example, in the sentence ‘the Number 10 knives were out for the Chancellor’ (BNC), ‘Number 10’ to refers metonymically to the UK Government via a PLACE FOR INSTITUTION relationship. Similarly, the word ‘Hoover’ can be used metonymically to mean vacuum cleaner, via a PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT relationship. Although metonymy is first and foremost cognitive process, it also serves as a kind of communicative shorthand, allowing people to use their shared knowledge to communicate with fewer words than they would otherwise need. As well as serving a referential purpose, it can be used for a wide variety of communicative functions, such as relationship-building, humour, irony and euphemism. This chapters provides an overview of current research on metonymy in order to illustrate its ubiquity, its importance and its complexity. After defining metonymy, the chapter discusses the various models that have been proposed within Cognitive Linguistics to explain how metonymy operates. It then outlines some of the key functions that metonymy performs in language and other forms of communication Throughout the chapter, the discussion is illustrated with real-world examples of metonymy.