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Volume 13, Issue 1
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Abstract

The paper describes some of the various instances of metonymy-guided pragmatic inferencing identified in two corpora, a Spanish corpus and an English corpus, which we compiled as part of project PGC2018-101214-B-I00. The texts in both corpora have approximately the same size and are evenly distributed in terms of medium (spoken and written) and genre. The results show that, with the aid of context and pragmatic principles, conceptual metonymy “guides,” in Barcelona’s (2024) terminology, many pragmatic inferences, including several types of implicatures and indirect speech acts (Klaus-Uwe Panther & Linda L. Thornburg 2018; Panther 2022) in all the texts analyzed. It also partly guides the recognition of various types of irony and of other figures of speech encountered in the texts, especially hyperbole and understatement (Beatriz Martín-Gascón 2019, 2022; Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Inés Lozano-Palacio 2019a, 2019b, 2021; Ruiz de Mendoza & Alicia Galera Masegosa 2020; Lozano-Palacio & Ruiz de Mendoza 2022). The analysis of the results is still in progress, but we have already found instances that extend the role of metonymy in indirect speech acts beyond Panther and Thornburg’s accounts by providing indirect, metonymic access to the speech act scenario element that in turn provides access to the intended speech act. The paper has also been able to show that metonymy guides most of the implicatures arising from the examined texts and noted the important role of metonymy in irony, hyperbole, and understatement. Finally, the paper has shown how metonymy-guided inferencing creates discourse coherence, both relational and referential (Barcelona 2024).

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2026-04-17
2026-05-19

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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): conceptual metonymy; discourse coherence; hyperbole; implicature; indirect speech acts; irony; understatement

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