How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis (2022)

Abstract: Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

## introduction several works from cognitive linguistics claim that systematic metonymy is universal across human languages @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . however, crosslinguistic surveys on the phenomenon have so far been limited to a small number of well-studied languages such as english. an important reason for this limitation is that current methodologies in cross-linguistic semantic analysis require serious involvement of language experts @xcite or native speakers @xcite @xcite or simply not suitable for metonymy studies such as the elicitation techniques @xcite . on the other hand, the recent trend of exploiting digitally available lexical resources makes largescale semantic studies feasible; e.g., the study of the emotion domain in 2474 languages @xcite . this method is especially suitable for systematic metonymy as it is lexically encoded. therefore, we used a lexico-semantic content of multilingual lexical databases to build a large-scale metonymy corpus that covers 26 metonymy patterns and 20 thousand metonymy instances (word pairs) in 189 languages belonging to 69 genera. due to the broad linguistic coverage, our results considerably strengthen the stance on metonymy as a universal phenomenon. this new, freely available, online corpus of metonymy examples categorized by patterns is also reusable for future studies. ## methods among the various kinds of resources-databases, dictionaries, corpora-that were available to us, multilingual lexical databases were suitable to semi-automatically build a large multilingual cor-pus of metonymies. the explicit representation of words, their meanings, and their domains in multiple languages, as well as the presence of a crosslingual alignment of meanings and domains enable us to extract metonymy in an efficient, partially automated manner. our database of choice is the universal knowledge core (ukc) foot_0 @xcite , due to its wide linguistic, lexical, and conceptual coverage (120 thousand word meanings, 2 million words in 1127 languages). metonymy patterns are straightforward to model through the three-layered domain-concept-lexicon architecture of the ukc. the concept layer represents supra-lingual meanings as a hierarchy of concepts based on the standard lexicographic broader-narrower relationship. the domain layer of the ukc provides a simple semantic categorization of concepts into domains such as animal. the lexical layer, finally, consists of a separate lexicon for each language, each one lexicalizing the supra-lingual concept layer. metonymy corpus extraction process consisted of three steps. first, from the metonymy patterns mentioned in the literature, we selected a subset for which the ukc provides data. second, through automatic extraction and expert validation, we identified metonymically related concepts. third, based on the definitive set of metonymically related concept pairs, we automatically extracted lexicalizations for all languages in the database. ## results on the conceptual level, even specific concept pairs appear to be universal: for instance, 49 languages from 22 genera use the concept ' ## conclusions metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal phenomenon. however, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. we introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. no prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.