Contents Introduction Similarity versus contiguity?

Contents

1. 
   Introduction
   

2. 
   Similarity versus contiguity?
   

3. 
   Source/target links as part of the message
   

4. 
   Additional Discussion
   

5. 
   Conclusions
   

Introduction

Specifying the nature of metaphor and metonymy has long been a difficult problem. It has been particularly difficult to specify convincing grounds for differentiating the two figures from each other [1; 9; 16]. The literature exhibits a wide variety of opinion. In this paper we look mainly at two important alleged grounds for differentiation, namely that metaphor involves similarity whereas metonymy involves contiguity or related notions of semantic/pragmatic connection, and that metonymy preserves links to the source domain item as part of the message whereas metaphor does not. We briefly consider several other issues, including the question of whether metaphor and metonymy interact differently with some postulated structure of domains, frames, idealized cognitive models, or other compartmentalizations of conceptual information.

The paper will conclude that these various possible grounds for differentiation do not, as currently conceived at any rate, provide a firm distinction between metaphor and metonymy. This failure holds even if the putative grounds are combined rather than considered in isolation. The conclusion supports a similar one by Haser, but the paper adds qualitatively new evidence and critique. It leaves it open whether more careful accounts of the alleged differences could lead to a crisp metaphor/metonymy distinction, or whether additional differences could help. Our considerations will also not stop metaphor and metonymy having some tendency to differ in particular ways; with, for instance, metaphor tending to involve a rich form of similarity but metonymy tending not to.

There have been various notions, in the literature, of a cline or spectrum of phenomena incorporating metaphor and metonymy. Radden makes one such proposal. Dirven discusses a phenomenon of post-metonymy, intermediate between metaphor and metonymy, although Riemer argues that post-metonymy need not lead in the direction of metaphor. Croft and Cruse give examples that suggest intermediate possibilities between metaphor and metonymy, while also warning that what may appear to be intermediacy may be the result of combining distinctly different processes. The present article regards the idea of a spectrum as broadly being on the right track, but pushes the idea further. It doubts that we should think of just a one-dimensional space of possibilities: rather, there are several and perhaps numerous different ways in which metaphor and metonymy can vary in their essence — including variance as regards amounts and types of similarity and contiguity. The positioning of metaphor and metonymy within the space created by these dimensions and others may be very complex.

We will come back to the question of whether there may be intermediate possibilities between metaphor and metonymy in Section 4. Intermediacy is the question whether there are phenomena that have some of the qualities of both metaphor and metonymy but do not qualify as either. For now we focus briefly on the contrasting notion of 2 overlap of metaphor and metonymy. Overlap is the question of whether there is a phenomenon that at one and the same time qualifies as being both metaphor and metonymy. We will see that there is evidence of a type of overlap that is distinct from a type that has already been much discussed in the literature. The latter type consists of the sorts of mixing of metaphor and metonymy that have been discussed under the headings of metaphor within metonymy, metonymy within metaphor, chaining of metaphor and metonymy, and so forth [4; 7; 16]. Those types of mixing involve some conceptual item A being linked to some item X, and X to B, where either the A–X link is metaphorical and the X–B link is metonymic, or vice versa. Rather, the type of mixing or overlap addressed in this paper is where an item A is linked to an item B in such a way that qualifies simultaneously as both metaphor and metonymy, but where the situation is not analysable as a chaining of an A–X link and an X–B link. This simultaneity is also to be distinguished from alternativity: the possibility of alternative interpretations of an utterance taking the A–B link to be just metaphorical or just metonymic.

Ritchie says, in referring mainly to metaphor, “figurative use of language may itself constitute a field of meaning, with dimensions such as conceptuality, opaqueness, literalness, triteness, formality, folkishness among others,” and Cameron has provided nine dimensions on which metaphor can vary. Many dimensions have been important elsewhere in the literature, such as aptness, vividness, memorability, imageability, evaluativeness, persuasiveness, literariness, social divisiveness/cohesiveness, entrenchedness and cultural specificity. But with the probable exception of literalness, such dimensions arguably do not affect decisions as to whether metaphor or metonymy is involved. The present article is more concerned with dimensions which could be said to be genuinely constitutive of metaphor and metonymy.

Metaphoricity and metonymicity are, arguably, language-user-relative in a deep way. They are affected by such things as the particular lexicon, encyclopaedic knowledge, and interconceptual relationships held by a particular language user (whether utterer or understander). Thus, in principle, an expression should not be said to be metaphorical or metonymic in any absolute sense, but only for a particular user. Of course, in practice, many expressions may be metaphorical or metonymic for the vast majority of native users of a language, and the way in which expressions are metaphorical or metonymic may also be the same or similar across such users (e.g., involve the same conceptual metaphor such as LOVE AS JOURNEY, or the same metonymical schema such as CONTAINER FOR CONTENTS). Relativity has been pointed out by various other authors [2; 5; 6; 7; 9; 11; 19]. We will not be exploring it in this article, but we need to distinguish it from the issue of the differentiation of metaphor and metonymy. User-relativity does not necessarily imply that the metaphor and metonymy cannot in general be cleanly differentiated or that, for a given user, particular cases of metaphor and metonymy cannot be cleanly differentiated; 3 and, conversely, a lack of a clean differentiation between the notions of metaphor and metonymy does not necessarily imply user-relativity.

Because of its aims, this paper does not rest upon any particular definition of metaphor or metonymy, but instead on other authors’ claims for metaphoricity or metonymicity of examples used, or on the present author’s judgments of how particular examples would be classified in the field. The paper does nevertheless embody a cognitive assumption, in viewing metaphor and metonymy as being largely to do with cognitive representation and processing issues as opposed to the surface form of utterances. (In the case of lexicalized metaphor or metonymy the representation and processing may have occurred in the past, and thus merely be part of etymological motivation.) To the extent that metaphor and metonymy are matters of processing, the issues in this paper amount to questions such as the extent to which the processing creates or traverses similarity and/or contiguity links between conceptual items.

However, the word “link” will be meant in a very general and theory-neutral way. Links certainly include those between target aspects and source aspects that are proposed in an explicitly mapping-based accountsuch as Conceptual Metaphor Theory, for instance when the participants in a love relationship are linked to occupants of a travelling car. But the notion is broader: for example, even though the sentence My job is a jail is analysed in the classinclusion approach in terms of a category of entities that includes both the job and physical jails, we will still describe it as implicitly involving a “link” between the job and either a hypothetical physical jail or the general category or concept of physical jails, even if no direct link is established in the understander’s mind or proposed in the theory. This way of talking is just in the service of having a uniform way of describing the fact that, in metaphor, at least one target item is explicitly or implicitly, and directly or highly indirectly, associated with at least one source item. Although the class-inclusion theory’s attention is on the idea of class inclusion as such, our attention is on the nature of the implied link between target item and source item, e.g. between the job and the (hypothetical) physical jail, or between the job and the physical-jail category. This link could, for instance, be regarded as a similarity link based on possession of whatever property or set of properties are held to define the superordinate category under which both target item and source item are placed. In the job/jail example, the similarity might consist of both the job and a physical jail being constraining and difficult to escape. (Care is needed here to postulate suitably abstract notions of constraining and escape, in light of the circularity objections raised by Ritchie [2006] and others).

Also, a link can take a collapsed, degenerate form: namely, that of an imaginary identification. For example, if in a blend space one entity is identified with another, that identification is itself a link in our sense. And if the entities come from input mental spaces, the corresponding entities in those spaces can also be said to be linked indirectly with each other via the identification link 4 in the blend space. Finally, to the extent that metaphor and metonymy are in part processing issues, we need to keep in mind the possibility that links might only be classifiable as metonymic or metaphorical by taking into account the way the links are used in processing rather than or as well as any other aspect of their nature.

The structure of the rest of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, we mainly consider whether a distinction between metaphor and metonymy can be found in a distinction between similarity and contiguity. In Section 3 we look at the extent to which source/target links are themselves kept as part of the messages conveyed by metaphorical or metonymic utterances. Section 4 briefly examines two further possible grounds for differentiation, namely the interaction with conceptual compartments such as domains and frames, and the role of imaginary identification/categorization of target items and/or source items. Section 4 also comments further on intermediacy and overlap of metaphor and metonymy, and briefly considers claims that (some) metaphor can be viewed as double metonymy. Section 5 concludes, and explains how can be profitable to analyse utterances at the level of the dimensions of variation discussed in the article (similarity, etc.), as opposed to the higher level of metaphor and metonymy as such.