Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Current Issue

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).

The main thrust of the contribution of this study is to demonstrate not only the ubiquity and pervasiveness of conceptual metonymy and metaphor in producing and understanding illocutionary acts, i.e., speech acts, but also to account for this observation by explicating the roles of various folk models such as Action, Talk, and Embodiment.

The paper maintains that folk models (i.e., cultural models/cognitive schemas intersubjectively shared by a social group) impact grammatical structures and usages and, in themselves, constitute a basis for associative and analogical reasoning, i.e., they give rise to conceptual metonymies and metaphors.

The first part of the paper accounts for indirect speech act data with reference to scenarios constructed for three types of illocutionary acts: directives, commissives, and expressives. After providing cultural and linguistic evidence of the psychological validity of the folk model of Action (vs. Talk), an Action Scenario is developed, which forms the basis of the speech act models. The conceptual structure proposed for Illocutionary Scenarios consists of components termed the Before, Core, Result, and After. All indirect speech acts, we maintain, come about by means of constructing utterances that instantiate (or refer to) non-Core components of the model, which are exploited metonymically to index a target (Core) meaning.

In the second part of the paper, we focus on the Core component of commissives, declarations, and expressives as manifested in utterances expressing bodily movements and acts of transfer and possession. Such “explicit embodied performatives” rely on a folk model of communication called the Transfer Model of Communication. Interestingly, embodied performatives are indeed figurative; however, they are not felt to be indirect.

The paper concludes with questions for future research: (i) What kind of pragmatic constraints operate on the deployment of indirect speech acts? and (ii) Which speech act types are realizable via explicit embodied performatives?

Various works on metonymy in word-formation do not agree on to what extent word-formation has a metonymic basis. The proponents of the “broad” view claim that metonymy is a mental process inherent in coining (almost) all words, while the proponents of the “narrow” view restrict its application to specific forms only, expressing their concerns that the unrestricted application of metonymy in word-formation would make the notion vacuous. The present paper argues for a “broader” view on the basis that metonymy is seen primarily as a mental process based on a relationship between a motivating and a named concept, the former providing mental access to the latter. This does not mean, however, that all complex words have a metonymic basis. Complex words that are variations on existing lexemes, such as variation driven syntactically, e.g., transposition, or pragmatically, e.g., diminutiveness, refer to the same concept as the derivational base, so we cannot speak of a relationship between two concepts. The resulting form with which the named concept is expressed is irrelevant as it solely depends on the formal means a language offers. The paper cannot thus claim that typologically different languages (e.g., synthetic languages with predominant suffixation versus analytic ones with predominant compounding) make use of cognitive processes to a different extent since they only use different formal means for the same purpose.

This article examines metonymy within the grammatical domain of morphology (Janda 2011; Brdar 2017; Gutiérrez Rubio 2021; Kos & Gutiérrez Rubio, this volume), focusing on Spanish denominal verbs ending in -ear derived from body part nouns (e.g., manosear, pestañear). These verbs illustrate morphological recategorization through an affix that is semantically underspecified, serving primarily to mark a categorial shift. They parallel English denominal verbs formed by conversion, as in “I was anxious to get inside and nose around her house,” where the noun nose functions as a verb.

The referential domain of body parts reflects fundamental human experience, providing a conceptual basis for verb formation and interpretation. As Kövecses and Radden (1998: 60) argue, the ease of creating and processing such verbs stems from common metonymic patterns. Specifically, verbs like manosear and pestañear instantiate a primary metonymy, where a body part stands for the action it performs: mano (“hand”) for touching, pestaña (“eyelash”) for eyelash movement. Both cases exemplify the broader metonymic schema BODY PART FOR ACTION, with hands and eyelashes functioning as Instrument and Theme, respectively.

The analysis draws on dictionary definitions supplemented by corpus data to illustrate authentic usage. Findings suggest that Spanish verbs derived from body part nouns not only reflect cross-linguistic tendencies in the semantic extension of body part terms but also reveal language-internal variation shaped by cultural factors. This study thus contributes to understanding how metonymy motivates morphological processes and highlights the interplay between cognitive mechanisms and linguistic structure.

The article explores the relationship between conceptual metonymy and the use of cardinal numbers in Spanish and English. Real instances of language have been used to describe this conceptual relation. The metonymic mappings identified in the use of some cardinal numbers exhibit different levels of conceptual organization in terms of meaning and form. The two main metonymies that we observed in the semantics of the expressions analyzed are cardinal for co-occurring numerical entity and cardinal for co-occurring non-numerical entity. The expressions studied use the domain of numerical concepts as source in order to arrive at two slightly different but similar domains of experience which are co-occurring numerical entity and co-occurring non-numerical entity. Furthermore, the form of some of the expressions analyzed is motivated by the high-level metonymy salient part of a form for the whole form.

Synesthetic expressions are generally taken to be metaphorical phenomena involving a mapping across distinct perceptual domains based on cross-modal commonalities between them. The present paper seeks to supplement this view so far as to point out that some synesthetic expressions are essentially metonymic since they do not involve any cross-modal similarities or correspondences and are rather based either on the co-occurrence of stimuli from different sensory modalities, and/or on similarities within a single sensory modality. In order to find out how pervasive the metonymic motivation of synesthetic expressions might be, the study focuses on attribute-noun constructions combining taste with smell in Hungarian. The results of the corpus investigation suggest that a considerable portion of the synesthetic expressions under scrutiny are in fact metonymic, yet the frequency of taste adjectives describing smells, as well as that of the metonymic cases is unequally distributed across nouns designating pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant smells.

According to Antonio Barcelona (2012), metonymy is more than just a lexical phenomenon. It is a conceptual mechanism (an inferential schema) operating under the lexicon, in the lexicon, and above the lexicon. In light of the fact that “lexical metonymies are often at the same time grammatical and discourse metonymies” (Barcelona 2012: 254), we realize that metonymy is “a ubiquitous, multilevel phenomenon.” This is also in keeping with the Equipollence Hypothesis (Ricardo Mairal-Usón & Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 2009; Ruiz de Mendoza & Alba Luzondo Oyón 2012), according to which cognitive and linguistic processes found to be at work in one domain of linguistic inquiry are expected to be active in other domains, too. The hypothesis is here extended to apply to all modes of communication, including pictorial and visuo-kinetic modalitites. This article first shows that, unsurprisingly, metonymy is also pervasive in signed languages and that it occurs at several levels or layers. Secondly, the study demonstrates that many of these metonymies are complex. Thirdly, the study argues that a number of metonymies are (no longer) recognized as such due to reductions of an excessively structuralist approach to sign languages.

This paper aims at illustrating the role of conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor in the meaning construal of the philosopher Alan Watts’s “The Beauty of Nothingness” by the Portuguese choreographer and dancer Tiago Coelho. As Irene Mittelberg (2019: 10) claims: “Generally speaking, there are innumerable latent contiguity relations out there in the world, in our imagination, and in our embodied knowledge structures that may be operationalized when we are reasoning and communicating.” In line with this perspective, the research presented here will focus on the contiguity relations between the dancer’s internal world and his communication of the world described by Watts. I fully endorse Mark Johnson’s (2007) claim that aesthetics lies at our very capacity to make meaning and that art is simply an exemplary manifestation of this ability. As he points out, humans are sentient beings, explorers of space, other entities, their inner life. In line with these ideas, the present analysis of the contemporary dance choreography is an attempt at approaching the choreographer’s exemplary manifestation of meaning making as well as describing the underlying resources, which he as a human being has and puts at the service of his own construal as well as the construal that reaches the audience via his body.