Distinguishing Metonymy from Synecdoche

Human Cognitive Processing

Volumn 4, Issue , 1999, Pages 91-120

  Seto, Ken Ichi ^a  

^a Osaka Prefecture University   (Japan)

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EID: 85190648326     PISSN: 13876724     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.4.06set     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Part of this paper was first read at the 11th New Zealand Linguistic Society Conference (Victoria University, 19 May, 1995). I would like to thank Claudia Brugman, Elizabeth Mathis, Günter Radden, Jae Jung Song, Tomoko Tsujimoto, Kimihiro Yoshimura and Beatrice Warren for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially indebted to Brigitte Nerlich for a number of critical comments on the manuscript. My special thanks are due to John Taylor for reading the entire draft and making helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms.
2. A taxonomy might be better represented as a tree diagram and a partonomy as a ring in a circle, but it is important to note that a tree diagram itself can also be interpreted in terms of partonomy, just as a branch is a part of a tree in the world. On the other hand, a figure showing a ring in a circle, even if it is intended to represent a partonomical relation, can also be interpreted in terms of a taxonomy just as easily. The choice of figures or representational formats does not affect the argument about Figure 1 and Figure 2. What is at issue is a clear distinction between partonomy and taxonomy, and ultimately between E-relation and C-relation.
3. This is one, presumably the most important, of the several different senses that Jakobson (1956) gives to the term ‘contiguity.’ For some controversies concerning the characterization of metonymy in the classical paper, cf. Cooper (1986: 34–37), Dirven (1993: 10), Warren (1995: 137f), and Nerlich (forthcoming).
4. Washing in (10a), which means ‘clothes to be washed,’ may also be seen as a ‘material’ cause. ‘Material’ can be one of the ‘causes’ which make the following process possible.
5. Note that I am not concerned with the relation between the group category and its subcategories. Thus a subcategory tribe is C-related with its supercategory group (e.g., tribes are a kind of (human) group).
6. To repeat the same point, the category university may be classified into subcategories such as national university, state university, private university, and so on. Of course, other subcategorizations (e.g., women’s university) are also possible. All this is a C-based classification.
7. Cruse (1986: 176) claims that proletariat-worker is a class-member relation, and that it is an example, though admittedly marginal, of the whole-part relation. In our terms, proletariat-worker is a class-element relation, which is necessarily C-related, not a whole-part relation. Compare this with the relation between a (specific) labor union and its members. The latter is an organization-member relation, hence an E-relation (e.g., a union member is a part of the union). Also worth mentioning is that the existence of sentences like Frying is part of/a type (kind) of cooking does not imply that sometimes the distinction between the E-relation and the C-relation gets blurred, but instead confirms that there are two different cognitive models. One model sees cooking as a series of processes that are aligned along the temporal axis: Frying is one such process, i.e., a (temporal) part of the whole processes (frying may come after chopping). The other model sees cooking as a category of different cooking methods: Frying is one of the possible cooking methods as opposed to, say, boiling, grilling, roasting, etc.
8. Note that the distinction between E-relation and C-relation does not correspond to the traditional distinction between extension and intension because the latter terms are both concerned with categories. Roughly speaking, extension is concerned with a class of entities, and intension is concerned with the defining property of the class (cf. Lyons 1995: 81). However, while the C-relation has to do with categories, i.e., classes, the E-relation has to do with the contiguous relation between individual entities, not classes.
9. Randomly chosen languages are: Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Javanese, Turkish, and Italian. Though it is too early to speak of universality (the German translation, for example, is only marginally acceptable), the one-to-one correspondence among several different languages in the relevant respect may hint that the container-contents type as a metonymic template, not as a specific example, is a cross-linguistic phenomenon. This may be partly confirmed by the fact that all the examples in this section, like most of the metonymic examples in the other sections, translate acceptably into Japanese word for word.
10. One may find it difficult to accept some of the following examples as instances of metonymy because the nominalization process itself causes the shift in meaning. It may be argued, however, that the meaning shift in the nominalization process itself is metonymic. Thus supplies seems doubly metonymic: one from supply (v) to supplies (n); the other from supply (n) as in a regular supply of fresh vegetables to supplies (n).
11. Most metonymic examples in this paper have come from Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski series: Guardian Angel, Toxic Shock, Burn Marks, Tunnel Vision, and Indemnity Only. A few examples are from dictionaries and other sources.
12. In diachronic semantics synecdoche in our sense has been known as ‘generalization’ and ‘specialization.’ Thus Geeraerts (1994) refers to specialization, generalization, metonymy, and metaphor as “the classical quartet,” which I would like to call ‘the classical trio’ in terms of synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. Nerlich (forthcoming) is clear in appreciating the cognitive difference between metonymy and synecdoche along the line of the present paper: “Metonymy is based on our world-knowledge about space and time, cause and effect, part and whole, whereas synecdoche is based on our taxonomic or categorical knowledge. Metonymy exploits our knowledge of how the world is, synecdoche of how it is ordered in our mind.”
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