Metonymy

Not to be confused with meronymy or meronomy.

Metonymy (/mɨˈtɒnɨmi/ mi-TONN-ə-mee) is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept. The words "metonymy" and "metonym" come from the Greek: μετωνυμία, metōnymía, "a change of name", from μετά, metá, "after, beyond" and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix used to name figures of speech, from ὄνῠμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, "name".

For instance, "Wall Street" is often used metonymously to describe the U.S. financial and corporate sector, while "Hollywood" is used as a metonym for the U.S. film industry because of the fame and cultural identity of Hollywood, a district of the city of Los Angeles, California, as the historical center of American film studios and US film stars.

Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday talk and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, multiple meanings of a single word or phrase, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity.

American literary theorist Kenneth Burke described metonymy as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, a substitute for perspective; metonymy, a substitute for reduction; synecdoche, a substitute for representation; and irony, a substitute for dialectic. He described these tropes and the way they overlap in A Grammar of Motives.

In addition to its use in everyday speech, metonymy is a figure of speech in some poetry and in much rhetoric. Greek and Latin scholars of rhetoric made significant contributions to the study of metonymy.

Meaning relationships

Synecdoche, wherein a specific part of something is used to refer to the whole, or the whole to a specific part, usually is understood as a specific kind of metonymy. However, sometimes people make an absolute distinction between a metonymy and a synecdoche, treating metonymy as different from, rather than inclusive of, synecdoche. There is a similar problem with the use of simile and metaphor.

When the distinction is made, it is the following: when "A" is used to refer to "B", it is a synecdoche if A is a component of B or if B is a component of A, and a metonym if A is commonly associated with B but not part of its whole or a whole of its part. Thus, "20,000 hungry mouths to feed" is a synecdoche because mouths (A) are a part of the people (B) referred to. "Australia votes" is also a synecdoche because Australia is a whole of which the people who voted are a part. On the other hand, "The White House said" is metonymy, but not synecdoche, for the president and his staff, because, although the White House is associated with the president and his staff, the building is not a part of the people.

Metalepsis is also closely related to metonymy. Much as synecdoche, it is sometimes understood as a specific kind of metonymy. Metalepsis is a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context. The new figure of speech refers to an existing one. For example, in the idiom lead foot, meaning someone who drives fast, lead is a heavy substance, and a heavy foot on the accelerator pedal would cause a vehicle to go quickly. The use of "lead foot" to describe a person follows the intermediate substitution of "lead" for "heavy". The figure of speech is a "metonymy of a metonymy".

The concept of metonymy also informs the nature of polysemy, i.e., how the same phonological form (word) has different semantic mappings (meanings). If the two meanings are unrelated, as in the word pen meaning both writing instrument and enclosure, they are considered homonyms.

Within logical polysemies, a large class of mappings may be considered to be a case of metonymic transfer (e.g., chicken for the animal, as well as its meat; crown for the object, as well as the institution). Other cases wherein the meaning is polysemous, however, may turn out to be more metaphorical, e.g., eye as in the eye of the needle.

Metaphor and metonymy

Main article: Metaphor and metonymy

Metonymy works by the contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas the term metaphor is based upon their analogous similarity. When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with metaphor. There is nothing press-like about reporters or crown-like about a monarch, but "the press" and "the crown" are both common metonyms. Some uses of figurative language may be understood as both metonymy and metaphor; for example, the relationship between "a crown" and a "king" could be interpreted metaphorically (i.e., the king, like his gold crown, could be seemingly stiff yet ultimately malleable, over-ornate, and consistently immobile).

Two examples using the term "fishing" help clarify the distinction. The phrase "to fish pearls" uses metonymy, drawing from "fishing" the idea of taking things from the ocean. What is carried across from "fishing fish" to "fishing pearls" is the domain of metonymy.

In contrast, the metaphorical phrase "fishing for information" transfers the concept of fishing into a new domain. If someone is "fishing" for information, we do not imagine that the person is anywhere near the ocean; rather, we transpose elements of the action of fishing (waiting, hoping to catch something that cannot be seen, probing) into a new domain (a conversation). Thus, metaphor works by presenting a target set of meanings and using them to suggest a similarity between items, actions, or events in two domains, whereas metonymy calls up or references a specific domain (here, removing items from the sea).

Examples

Main article: List of metonyms

Here are some broad kinds of relationships where metonymy is frequently used:

• Containment: When one thing contains another, it can frequently be used metonymically, as when "dish" is used to refer not to a plate but to the food it contains, or as when the name of a building is used to refer to the entity it contains, as when "the White House" or "the Pentagon" are used to refer to the U.S. presidential staff or the military leadership, respectively.
• Tools/Instruments: Often a tool is used to signify the job it does or the person who does the job, as in the phrase "the press" (referring to the printing press), or as in the proverb, "The pen is mightier than the sword."
• Product for Process: This is a type of metonymy where the product of the activity stands for the activity itself. For example, in "The book is moving right along," the book refers to the process of writing or publishing.
• Punctuation marks often stand metonymically for a meaning expressed by the punctuation mark. For example, "He’s a big question mark to me" indicates that something is unknown.
• Synecdoche: A part of something is often used for the whole, as when people refer to "head" of cattle or assistants are referred to as "hands." An example of this is the Canadian dollar, referred to as the loonie for the image of a bird on the one-dollar coin. Also, the whole of something is used for a part, as when people refer to a municipal employee as "the council" or police officers as "the law".
• Toponyms: A country's capital city is frequently used as a metonym for the country's government, such as Washington, D.C., in the United States. Similarly, other important places, such as Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Detroit are commonly used to refer to the industries that are located there (finance, advertising, high technology, entertainment, and motor vehicles, respectively). Such usage may persist even when the industries in question have moved elsewhere - for example, Fleet Street continues to be used as a metonym for the British national press, though it is no longer located in the physical street of that name.

Sometimes, metaphor and metonymy may both be at work in the same figure of speech, or one could interpret a phrase metaphorically or metonymically. For example, the phrase "lend me your ear" could be analyzed in a number of ways. One could imagine the following interpretations:

• Analyze "ear" metonymically first – "ear" means "attention" (because we use ears to pay attention to someone's speech). Now, when we hear the phrase "lending an ear (attention)", we stretch the base meaning of "lend" (to let someone borrow an object) to include the "lending" of non-material things (attention), but, beyond this slight extension of the verb, no metaphor is at work.
• Imagine the whole phrase literally – imagine that the speaker literally borrows the listener's ear as a physical object (and the person's head with it). Then the speaker has temporary possession of the listener's ear, so the listener has granted the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears. We then interpret the phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean that the speaker wants the listener to grant the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears.
• First, analyze the verb phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean "turn your ear in my direction", since we know that, literally, lending a body part is nonsensical. Then, analyze the motion of ears metonymically – we associate "turning ears" with "paying attention", which is what the speaker wants the listeners to do.

It is difficult to say which of the above analyses most closely represents the way a listener interprets the expression, and it is possible that the phrase is analysed in different ways by different listeners, or even in different ways by the same listener at different times. Regardless, all three analyses yield the same interpretation; thus, metaphor and metonymy, though quite different in their mechanism, may work together seamlessly.

Rhetoric in ancient history

Western culture studied poetic language and deemed it to be rhetoric. A. Al-Sharafi supports this concept in his book Textual Metonymy, "Greek rhetorical scholarship at one time became entirely poetic scholarship." Philosophers and rhetoricians thought that metaphors were the primary figurative language used in rhetoric. Metaphors served as a better means to attract the audience’s attention because the audience had to read between the lines in order to get an understanding of what the speaker was trying to say. Others did not think of metonymy as a good rhetorical method because metonymy did not involve symbolism. Al-Sharafi explains, "This is why they undermined practical and purely referential discourse because it was seen as banal and not containing anything new, strange or shocking."

Greek scholars contributed to the definition of metonymy. For example, Isocrates worked to define the difference between poetic language and non-poetic language by saying that "prose writers are handicapped in this regard because their discourse has to conform to the forms and terms used by the citizens and to those arguments which are precise and relevant to the subject-matter. In other words, Isocrates proposes here that metaphor is a distinctive feature of poetic language because it conveys the experience of the world afresh and provides a kind of defamiliarisation in the way the citizens perceive the world." Democritus described metonymy by saying, "Metonymy, that is the fact that words and meaning change." Aristotle discussed different definitions of metaphor, regarding one type as what we know to be metonymy today.

Latin scholars also had an influence on metonymy. The treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium states metonymy as, "the figure which draws from an object closely akin or associated an expression suggesting the object meant, but not called by its own name". The author describes the process of metonymy to us saying that we first figure out what a word means. We then figure out that word’s relationship with other words. We understand and then call the word by a name that it is associated with. "Perceived as such then metonymy will be a figure of speech in which there is a process of abstracting a relation of proximity between two words to the extent that one will be used in place of another." Cicero viewed metonymy as more of a stylish rhetorical method and described it as being based on words, but motivated by style.

See also

• -onym
• Antonomasia
• Deferred reference           
• Eggcorn
• Eponym
• Enthymeme
• Euphemism by comparison
• Generic trademark
• Kenning
• Meronymy
• Newspeak
• Pars pro toto           
• Slang
• Sobriquet
• Social stereotype
• Totum pro parte

References

Bibliography

• Blank, Andreas (1997). Prinzipien des lexikalischen Bedeutungswandels am Beispiel der romanischen Sprachen. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-093160-0. 
• Corbett, Edward P.J. (1998) [1971]. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511542-0. 
• Dirven, René (1999). "Conversion as a Conceptual Metonymy of Event Schemata". In K.U. Panther and G. Radden. Metonymy in Language and Thought. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 275–288. ISBN 978-90-272-2356-2. 
• Fass, Dan (1997). Processing Metonymy and Metaphor. Ablex. ISBN 978-1-56750-231-2. 
• Grzega, Joachim (2004). Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. ISBN 978-3-8253-5016-1. 
• Lakoff, George; Johnson, mark (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-05674-3. 
• Somov, Georgij Yu. (2009). "Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder". Semiotica 2009 (174): 309–66. doi:10.1515/semi.2009.037. 
• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 680. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 
• Warren, Beatrice (2006). Referential Metonymy. Publications of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund. Lund, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International. ISBN 978-91-22-02148-3. 

Further reading

• Fass, Dan (1988). "Metonymy and metaphor: what's the difference?". Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics 1. pp. 177–81. doi:10.3115/991635.991671. ISBN 963-8431-56-3. 
• Gaines, Charles (2003). "Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought" (64). 
• Jakobson, Roman (1995) [1956]. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Disturbances". In Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. On Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-63536-1. 
• Lakoff, George (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46801-1. 
• Low, Graham. "An Essay Is a Person". In Cameron, Lynne; Low, Graham. Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 221–48. ISBN 978-0-521-64964-3. 
• Pérez-Sobrino, Paula (2014). "Meaning construction in verbomusical environments: Conceptual disintegration and metonymy" (PDF). Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 70: 130–151. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.06.008. 
• Peters, Wim (2003). "Metonymy as a cross-lingual phenomenon" (PDF). Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Lexicon and Figurative Language 14: 1–9. doi:10.3115/1118975.1118976. 

External links

• The dictionary definition of metonymy at Wiktionary