The Interplay of Metaphor and Metonymy in Christian Symbols

ABSTRACT

Religious symbols are often treated as mysterious, and even magical, links between the visible and the invisible worlds. They also lie in the nature of Christianity: they are present in its language, liturgy, as well as various forms of religious art. On the one hand, taking the cognitive-linguistic standpoint, it can be claimed that religious symbols are metonymical in nature. However, in this paper, we argue that Christian symbols are, in fact, more complex conceptually, as they are often based on metaphtonymy, an interaction between metaphor and metonymy. Thus, in our qualitative study, we analyze selected examples of Christian symbols rooted in the biblical language and related directly or indirectly to the person of Christ in order to present the types of metaphtonymy motivating their meaning. The identified patterns of metaphor-metonymy interaction include metonymical expansion or reduction of either the metaphorical source or target domain. In this way we aim to show that despite the special role ascribed to religious symbols, thanks to the theory of metaphor-metonymy interaction their mysterious nature and complexities of meaning can be successfully untangled.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In the figures presented in this paper, the solid line stands for the metaphorical mapping while the dashed line represents the metonymical mapping.