The Potentiality for Actuality Metonymy in English and Hungarian

Human Cognitive Processing

Volumn 4, Issue , 1999, Pages 333-357

  Panther, Klaus Uwe ^a   Thornburg, Linda ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG   (Germany)

^b EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY   (Hungary)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85190675142     PISSN: 13876724     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.4.19pan     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Note that in this case the propositional content also changes.
2. For reasons yet to be determined the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY seems to be excluded from the referential domain.
3. One anonymous reviewer pointed out that our use of ‘part’ does not coincide with the traditional sense of metonymy based on referential contiguity and that we confuse conceptual contiguity (as a metalinguistic concept) with referential contiguity. We claim, however, that even referential (spatial) contiguities, e.g., the set of body parts are themselves conceptual constructs. As such they are also entities in conceptual space. Just as a prototypical body is conceptualized as having a head, trunk, arms, legs, etc., we propose that a prototypical directive speech act has the components listed in (7). In this sense it seems perfectly legitimate to refer to the felicity conditions of a speech act as ‘parts’ of the speech act scenario.
4. In Thornburg and Panther (1997) these concepts are explained more fully, especially the difference between the pragmatic result (effect) of a speech act and the result (effect) of a non-linguistic action.
5. In collecting our data, we presented native speakers of Hungarian with English sentences which instantiate the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy and asked them to give a natural translation in Hungarian. With one exception — the sentence in (38) with be able — the English data occur with the modal auxiliary can; the Hungarian translations contain, where possible, either the affix -hat-/-het-, which denotes possibility in a general sense, or the verb tud, which is roughly equivalent to ‘be able, know how.’ In particular, we wanted to know whether the ‘possibility’ and ‘ability’ modality markers -hat-/-het- and tud conveyed the same metonymic effect (i.e., implicating actuality) as in the English examples. We would like to thank various friends, colleagues and students for their time and assistance in providing most of the Hungarian data: Andrea Szirmai, Éva Szabó, Balazs Lövenberg, Zoltán Kövecses, and especially Rita Brdar-Szabó, who supplied many helpful grammatical points.
6. For the glosses of the Hungarian examples the following conventions will be used: words are separated by a space; morpheme boundaries are indicated by a hyphen; grammatical functions are indicated in small capitals. The abbreviations used are: ACC = accusative, ADJ = adjectival suffix, COND = conditional, DEF = definite conjugation, IMP = imperative, IND = indicative, INDEF = indefinite conjugation, PART = participle, PL = plural, POSS = possibitity, POSSESS = possessive, PRES = present tense, PRT = particle, SG = singular.
7. The abbreviation LOB stands for Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus.
8. In examples (15) and (16) the -ható complex may be regarded as an adjective-forming suffix deriving ‘possibility-passive’ adjectives from verbal bases. We are grateful to Rita Brdar-Szabó for providing the arguments in support of this claim and regard this analysis as additional support for ours.
9. The factors that determine whether a hedged performative can actually be used to perform the illocutionary act denoted by the performative verb are complex and will not be dealt with in any detail. Suffice it to say that I can ask you to leave does not constitute an act of asking nor does I must promise to be there constitute a promise.
10. With indirect commissives (offers) like (30), our Hungarian language consultants often preferred the more indirect conditional over the plainer indicative mood for reasons of politeness. This preference also holds for indirect directives.
11. We are grateful to Rita Brdar-Szabó for making this point clear to us.
12. This is an example of what Sweetser calls ‘speech act modality.’ Unlike (46), utterance (49) is not available as a topic-introducing or discourse-initiating device and seems to be restricted to a reactive slot in a discourse.
13. Bach, Kent, Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
14. Croft, William 1993 The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and metonymies. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 335–370.
15. Fraser, Bruce 1975 Hedged performatives. In P. Cole, J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 187–210.
16. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In P. Cole, J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 41–58.
17. Horn, Laurence R. 1989 A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
18. Keresztes, László 1992 A Practical Hungarian Grammar. Debrecen: Debreceni Nyári Egyetem.
19. Kövecses, Zoltán, Günter Radden 1998 Metonymy: developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77.
20. Lakoff, George 1987 Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
21. Panther, Klaus-Uwe 1981 Indirect speech act markers or why some linguistic signs are non-arbitrary. In R.A. Hendricks et al. (eds.), Papers from the Seventeenth Regional Meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society, April 30 - May 1, 1981. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 295–302.
22. Panther, Klaus-Uwe, Linda Thornburg 1998 A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–769.
23. Searle, John 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24. Searle, John 1975 Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole, J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts . New York: Academic Press, 59–82.
25. Sweetser, Eve 1990 From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26. Thornburg, Linda, Klaus-Uwe Panther 1997 Speech act metonymies. In W.A. Liebert et al. (eds.), Discourse and Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 205–219.