Expressivity and metonymic inferencing: Stylistic variation in non-literary language use

1. Introduction In line with its central interest in metaphor and metonymy as prominent principles of categorization, cognitive linguistics focuses primarily on everyday language. This empirical orientation is enhanced by the repeated identification of both phenomena as conceptual mechanisms, instead of merely rhetorical figures of speech. As convincingly illustrated in countless theoretical as well as empirical studies, this positioning has led to a remarkable turnaround in the tradition of metaphor and metonymy theory. Although already at an early stage the relevance of cognitive linguistic insights for the interpretation of literary texts was recognized (see, for instance, Turner, Death; Lakoff and Turner), little attention has been paid to aesthetic aspects of utterances in everyday language use as well. Precisely at this point, the present essay wants to raise specific interest in the impact of one conceptual mechanism, metonymy, on the realization of a stylistically marked (expressive) meaning in the context of nonliterary, everyday language use. For that purpose, two different types of utterances pertaining to equally different communicative settings will be discussed with regard to their expressive value (section 2). It will be shown, more specifically, to what extent metonymy may contribute to the instantiation of a general principle of Optimal Innovation (Giora, On Our), according to which "pleasurable" utterances require a balanced combination of conventional and innovative structures. First, however, sections 1.1 and 1.2 offer a brief sketch of the concepts needed for the analysis. 1.1. Cognitive Approaches to Linguistics and Stylistics The emergence of cognitive semantics in the second half of the 1970s, with its focus on the embodied nature and dynamics of meaning construction in everyday language use, has brought about a renewed interest in figurative language, in the broadest sense of the word, including metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner; Jakel; Kovecses, Metaphor), metonymy (Panther and Radden; Barcelona; Dirven and Porings; Panther and Thornburg), irony (Gibbs, Poetics; Giora, "Irony," On Our; Attardo, "Irony," "Humor"), and recently also humor (Attardo et al.; Coulson; Giora, On Our; Brone and Feyaerts, Cognitive). Despite the near-exclusive attention to metaphorical mappings in the early cognitive semantic studies, a more recent development has given center stage to metonymy as another major mechanism of construal, next to and in interaction with metaphorical (Goossens; Riemer) and blended conceptualizations (Fauconnier and Turner, "Conceptual," The Way; Turner and Fauconnier; Coulson and Oakley). Although a striking parallel with earlier accounts of figurative language in literary theory and stylistics can be discerned (Jakobson; Mukarovský; Lodge), the cognitive framework has only very recently been adopted as a heuristic tool in literary analysis. This adoption has resulted in a newly emerging field of cognitive stylistics (Semino and Culpeper) or cognitive poetics (Tsur, Toward, "Aspects"; Gavins and Steen). 1 Insights from modern semantics, prototypically from conceptual metaphor theories and Blending Theory, are incorporated into stylistics as descriptive tools for the analysis of cognitive construal in literary texts. The effect is that of a pendulum swinging back, since figurative language, the focus of earlier research on "foregrounding" mechanisms in literature, later adopted by linguistics and studied as basic cognitive mechanisms, now once again forms the locus of stylistic research, albeit mainly in its cognitive function: "Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language" (Semino and Culpeper ix). …