https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2848-6482
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ABSTRACT
In the literature, event metonymies have been used to explain how language users produce and interpret utterances in which certain events are understood in terms of their sub-events or the overall/complex events they are a part of. This paper attempts to discuss some pragmatic effects of event metonymies which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been explored to date.
The first section deals with how certain expressions based on SUB-EVENT FOR EVENT metonymies can be considered synonymous for others in real communicative terms. We, therefore, show how a sound theory of synonymy could not only benefit from the incorporation of referential metonymies but also from the inclusion of SUB-EVENT FOR EVENT metonymies. The second section focuses on how EVENT FOR SUB-EVENT mappings have proven useful to achieve certain pragmatic relevance and mitigation/euphemistic contextual effects which have never been described in the literature. In order to do so, we analyzed a collection of more than 60 expressions (obtained from a study with two native speakers of English) to observe how they can qualify as event metonymies.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Prof. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this paper, as well as Tim Kent and, especially, Ben Coghlin for their examples and revision. All remaining shortcomings are my own. I am also indebted to my wife, Consuelo, for providing me with many of the situations from where the examples were produced.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The use of the Internet as a source for language research has been broadly accepted in the specialized literature (cf. Kilgarriff & Grefenstette, Citation2003; Renouf, Citation2003; Bergh, Citation2005; Bergh & Zanchetta, Citation2008).
2 Near-synonyms are words that are close in meaning or words that “are almost synonyms, but not quite; very similar, but not identical, in meaning; not fully intersubstitutable, but instead varying in their shades of denotation, connotation, implicature, emphasis, or register” (DiMarco, Graeme, & Manfred, Citation1993).
4 See Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera (Citation2020) for a full account of implicated meaning based on the metonymic exploitation of scenarios of this and other kinds.
13 The CAUSE FOR EFFECT metonymy and its counterpart, EFFECT FOR CAUSE, have been delved into by Radden and Kövecses (Citation1999), Panther and Thornburg (Citation2000), Gibbs and Colston (Citation2012).
36 Whereas language play has been widely studied regarding metaphor (e.g. Brône & Feyaerts, Citation2002; Coulson, Citation2005; Kyratzis, Citation2003; Ritchie & Dyhouse, Citation2008), metonymy has received little attention to the best of our knowledge (e.g. Brône & Feyaerts, Citation2003; Vosshagen, Citation1999).
37 Metaphtonymy is a term coined by Louis Goossens (Citation1990) to refer to the combination of a metaphor and a metonymy. Since then, several interaction patterns between a metaphor and a metonymy have been described in the literature, as well as other phenomena such as metonymic and metaphoric chains and amalgams (e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, Citation2014).
44 https://www.golfchannel.com/article/golf-central-blog/adam-sandler-sends-wie-flowers-after-open-win.
46 Adapted from the film Good Will Hunting (1997).