Hello, everybody :) it's very strange but i can't still use this site) but it's interesting to read any webloges of different people =) and pardon for so late entry to this atmosphere... and now, please, read about metonymy, one of the kind of trope.
Metonymy is taken from Greek, what means "change of name".
Metonymy is a figurative meaning of word, which founding on the substitution of direct object name to another on the basis of contiguity.
Not infrequently, metonymy is confused with a metaphor. But:
- "Metaphor creates the relation between its objects, while metonymy presupposes that relation."
(Hugh Bredin, "Metonymy." Poetics Today, 1984)
- "Metonymy and metaphor also have fundamentally different functions. Metonymy is about referring: a method of naming or identifying something by mentioning something else which is a component part or symbolically linked. In contrast, metaphor is about understanding and interpretation: it is a means to understand or explain one phenomenon by describing it in terms of another."
(Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006)
- "If metaphor works by transposing qualities from one plane of reality to another, metonymy works by associating meanings within the same plane. . . The representation of reality inevitably involves a metonym: we choose a part of 'reality' to stand for the whole. The urban settings of television crime serials are metonyms--a photographed street is not meant to stand for the street itself, but as a metonym of a particular type of city life--inner-city squalor, suburban respectability, or city-centre sophistication."
(John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1992)
In order to understand the meaning of the metonymy, it is quite reasonable to show examples and observations:
- "Many standard items of vocabulary are metonymic. A red-letter day is important, like the feast days marked in red on church calendars. . . . On the level of slang, a redneck is a stereotypical member of the white rural working class in the Southern U.S., originally a reference to necks sunburned from working in the fields."
(Connie Eble, "Metonymy." The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992) - "Fear gives wings."
(Romanian proverb) - "Detroit is still hard at work on an SUV that runs on rain forest trees and panda blood."
(Conan O'Brien) - The White House asked the television networks for air time on Monday night.
- "Whitehall prepares for a hung parliament."
(The Guardian, January 1, 2009) - "I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again."
(Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep) - "One of the favorite American metonymic processes is the one in which a part of a longer expression is used to stand for the whole expression. Here are some examples for the 'part of an expression for the whole expression' metonymy in American English:
Danish for Danish pastry
shocks for shock absorbers
wallets for wallet-sized photos
Ridgemont High for Ridgemont High School
the States for the United States
(Zoltán Kövecses, American English: An Introduction. Broadview, 2000)
- The suits on Wall Street walked off with most of our savings.
- "The B.L.T. left without paying."
(waitress referring to a customer) - "The following trivial metonymic [utterance] may serve as an illustration of an idealized cognitive model:
Let's go to bed now.
Going to bed is typically understood metonymically in the sense of 'going to sleep.' This metonymic target forms part of an idealized script in our culture: when I want to sleep, I first go to bed before I lie down and fall asleep. Our knowledge of this sequence of acts is exploited in metonymy: in referring to the initial act we evoke the whole sequence of acts, in particular the central act of sleeping."
(Günter Radden, "The Ubiquity of Metonymy." Cognitive and Discourse Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. by José Luis Otal Campo, Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, and Begoña Bellés Fortuño. Universitat Jaume, 2005)
Great thanks,
Kuralay