What is it about?
Metonymy is a linguistic device to convey an idea in an indirect way. Some people might say “Chris cut her hair at the salon on University Avenue” to mean that Chris had her hair cut at the salon. Is there any principled way of producing these metonymic expressions? We have shown that the grammatical preferences of metonymy at the level of predicates are motivated by the cognitive principles of Gestalt.
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Why is it important?
To reveal the principles underlying metonymy, a statistical description of reliable data is needed. This paper is probably the first attempt to empirically investigate grammatical tendencies of predicational metonymy.
Perspectives
This metonymy, ACTION FOR CAUSATION, is far more productive in Japanese than in English. This fact suggests that research on metonymy needs contrastive and typological investigation.
Tetsuta Komatsubara
Kobe Daigaku
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This page is a summary of: Cognitive principles underlying predicational metonymy, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, December 2019, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/cogls.00040.kom.
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