Noun-verb conversion as a metonymic metamorphosis

This study will shed some new light on the question where the implicit knowledge actithat purpose, a metonymic approach, which has been largely neglected beyond Cognitive Linguistics, will be discussed and exploited. In terms of event-schema metonymy, the role played by the participant the base noun denotes is so salient for the eventuality to be expressed that this participant can metonymically represent the eventuality as a whole (e.g. to pepper-spray the assailant -> INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION, to orbit the satellite -> GOAL FOR MOTION). This approach is an attractive alternative to lexicalist and syntax-based models because it dispenses with morphological or syntactic mechanisms. From the point of view of the decoder, however, event-schema metonymy seems to be rather complex because it requires the retrieval and activation of implicit knowledge. The aim of this study is first of all to suggest that the metonymic event construal is distributed over three levels of abstraction which in combination with the discourse context help the decoder to trace the route from the salient participant to the target eventuality. Moreover, a ranking of metonymic relations based on a substantial set of data from the Oxford English Dictionary will reveal an asymmetry in selection behaviour: Although the metonymic event construal seems to be guided by cognitive principles which reflect speakers' anthropocentric view of the world (e.g. HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN), the Agent is not the participant most readily selected to provide mental access to eventualities. This discrepancy is also accounted for by the multi-level model which allows us to differentiate between cognitively grounded perceptual selectivity and linguistic prominence.