Metonymy Goes Cognitive-Linguistic

1. From Structuralist Semantics to Cognitive Linguistics When Roman Jakobson pulled metaphor and metonymy to the center of the stage in linguistics and poetics, structuralists were trying to account for meaning by means of a componential model of clearly defined semantic elements (Jakobson, "Closing Statement"). Inspired by the success of Vladimir Propp's structuralist narratology, which attempted to account for story structure by means of a limited set of plot ingredients, and by structuralist phonology, which was able to characterize the various phonemes of language by means of a limited set of sound primitives and their combinations, structuralist semanticists set out to develop a similar approach for word meaning. This proved to be a difficult task. Here is Jonathan Culler's account of the problems raised by the approach advocated by A. J. Greimas: Greimas's machinery requires . that lexical items which can serve as the vehicle of a metaphor have the metaphorical potential incorporated in their lexical entries, so that, for example, the production of the correct reading for This man is a lion depends on the presence of the contextual seme human in the lexical entry for lion. Not only is this requirement in itself exceedingly cumbersome and counter-intuitive; it has the unfortunate consequence of entailing the suppression of semantic features on which the point of the metaphor may depend. (85-86) The problems with Greimas led to the conclusion that not every figurative use could be foreseen and encoded in an a priori fashion in a language's lexemes. As a result, metaphor and metonymy as problems of meaning were taken out of the semantics of language and located in its pragmatics. Culler, discussing metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche as part of the overall program of structuralist poetics, emphasized the role of readers' expectations and their application of reading conventions. David Lodge developed Roman Jakobson's opposition between metaphor and metonymy as two modes of writing and reading (Jakobson, "Two"). And Umberto Eco devoted his analytical powers to discovering various metaphoric and metonymic inferencing paths through the linguistic code (Role). These are just some illustrations of the general movement away from the language of the text as the sole basis for the construction of figurative meaning; a more complex model was gradually developing which most importantly included the role of the language user as an essential part. A similar development, away from an exclusive focus on semantics, took place in linguistics. The problem of metaphorical interpretation was first resolved by means of a proposal of semantic feature transfer, which was linked to the grammatical notion of selection restrictions (Weinreich). This led to a discussion of mechanisms of grammatical feature projection versus cancellation (e.g., Cohen; Levin). Then the whole semantic idea was abandoned and a move to handling figuration by pragmatic interpretation was advocated by philosophers of language Paul Grice and John Searle. A third philosopher of language who had a stake in this debate, Donald Davidson, also took figuration out of semantics and proposed an account of its function in terms of psychological effects rather than meaning, since meaning could only be literal. By the mid 1970s, the pragmatic account of metaphor and metonymy seemed to hold the best cards in poetics, linguistics, and philosophy. However, with the emphasis on reading conventions, modes of reading, inferencing, and pragmatic interpretation, the demarcation between the role of linguistic meaning and knowledge of the world became increasingly problematic (e.g., Eco, "Metaphor"). Appreciating the point of a metaphor like This man is a lion or a metonymy like She's nothing but a pretty face largely depends on our knowledge of the world, not on the linguistic meaning of the words out of context or on the pragmatic conventions for interpreting the language of these utterances. …