Metonymy revisited: Towards a new relevance-theoretic account

Metonymy is a pervasive aspect of spontaneous as well as reflective linguistic performance and its cognitive and communicative role needs to be adequately attended to. The paper aims to offer a new model of metonymy grounded in the relevance-theoretic approach to communication, adopting the view that all comprehension is underlain by inferential processes. First, we present a critical overview of selected existing accounts of metonymy put forward by cognitive linguists, arguing that although they offer valuable observations about the role of metonymy in online meaning construction and bring to light a varied spectrum of different types of metonymic conceptualizations, cognitive linguistic analyses fall some way short of offering a convincing rationale for metonymic uses in verbal communication and do not articulate a psychologically plausible and testable principle that would explain why metonymy arises and how the intended meaning is inferred in context by the recipient. We also critically address the existing relevance-theoretic models, which, while offering a cognitively motivated account of metonymy, likewise suffer from certain inadequacies. In an attempt to remedy these shortcomings, we develop a fully inferential relevance-theoretic account, which assumes that metonymy is a case of tagging the intended referent by a concept literally denoted by the metonymic expression. The real-world contiguity which underlies metonymic usage is postulated to be encapsulated in mental schemas that are indexed by the concept that the metonymic word or phrase provides access to.