For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for Poorer, in Sickness and in Health: A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach to Merism

ABSTRACT

This paper is a qualitative usage-based treatment of merism from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considered a minor or non-basic figure of speech, especially if compared to the master tropes, metaphor and metonymy, merism is approached here as a figure of speech whose complexity has been largely and unfairly underestimated. We provide a principled account of the relationship of merism with metonymy starting off from the well-known assumption that merism is a particular kind of synecdoche. The notion of merism is delimited and used in its etymological sense, which serves as a starting point for a two-fold classification of this figurative use into contrast-based merism and merism in which contrast plays no role (bare merism). We also explore the constructions which might trigger meristic uses and the characteristics of the terms involved in meristic binomials and trinomials which make them readily available for fusion into specific syntactic patterns like “X and Y,” “both X and Y,” “X and Y alike,” “X as well as Y,” and “X, Y, and Z.”

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Dr. Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza (University of La Rioja) and to two anonymous reviewers for their wise and insightful remarks on a previous draft of this paper. Any remaining weakness is my own responsibility. The research on which this paper is based has been funded by FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects numbers FFI2017-82730-P and PID2020-118349GB-I00.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez (2001, pp. 345–346) claim that “EFFECT FOR CAUSE” is a PART FOR WHOLE metonymy since it involves domain expansion. Causes can be regarded as domains consisting of subdomains like effects and causers. Thus, in “EFFECT FOR CAUSE” the subdomain “effect” conceptually refers to the matrix domain “cause”. These authors quote an example from Panther and Thornburg (2000) (A: What’s that noise? B: It’s a burglar) in which B interprets A’s question in metonymic terms as meaning “What is the cause of that noise?”. Panther and Thornburg (2000) have provided evidence that “EFFECT FOR CAUSE” underlies the interpretation of the What’s that N? construction. Consider another example: A: What’s that spot on your cheek? B: It’s my allergy. B’s answer is construed in terms of the metonymy “SYMPTOM FOR ITS CAUSE”, which is a subtype of “EFFECT FOR CAUSE” (Panther & Thornburg, 2000, p. 225).

² This first part of the configuration can also be filled by a noun playing the role of modifier of the second term.

³ Following Cruse (1986; 2004/2010, p. 166–168) reversives and converses are subtypes of directional opposites. Both involve movement or change and their paradigm cases are spatial. Reversives are verbs denoting movement in opposite directions (e.g., enter:leave) or change in opposite directions (e.g., dress:undress) between two terminal states. The focus is on the terminal states rather than on the details of the motion or process of change.

Converses (or relational opposites) are those pairs which involve a relationship between two entities by specifying the direction of one entity with respect to another one. They describe the same state of affairs but from the perspective of its different participants. They are sometimes even considered to be a type of synonym because of their semantic symmetry (Cruse, 2004/2010, p. 167). For instance, in Our apartment is below theirs and Their apartment is above ours or in The cat precedes the dog and The dog follows the cat the same states of affairs are described but from different perspectives. The paradigm cases are spatial but there are also metaphorical extensions of spatial notions like ancestor:descendant or buy:sell.

⁴ This is a strong tendency since co-hyponyms and co-meronyms for a given term are not necessarily incompatible. For instance, Cruse (2004/2010, p. 161) points out that “queen” and “mother” are both hyponyms of the superordinate term “woman”. Contrast arises in cases in which sister terms denote classes which are disjunct (for instance, “red” and “blue” as hyponyms of “color” or “heel” and “sole” as meronyms of “shoe”).

⁵ Notice should be taken, however, that, as has been claimed and will be shown through our analysis, contrast is a matter of degree.

⁶ This can be different depending on the cultural and religious background. For instance, in the Islamic world, the weekend is Friday and Saturday.

⁷ “Bittersweet memories” are memories which cause feelings of happiness and sadness at the same time. The adjectives “bitter” and “sweet” are opposites but the whole NP qualifies as a transferred epithet. It is not memories that are bitter and sweet. People remembering past events and situations experience feelings of sadness (metaphorically portrayed as bitterness) and happiness (metaphorically depicted as sweetness).

⁸ Dramedy (> drama + comedy) means a comedy with dramatic moments.

⁹ The blend plandid (> planned + candid) is used as a noun through conversion. It refers to “a photograph posted on a social media site which looks very natural, as if the subject was unaware that it was being taken, when in fact it had been planned”.

¹⁰ Paradox is to be distinguished from oxymoron. In the latter, the apparent contradiction is between two opposite terms, rather than situations, which co-occur syntagmatically as if they were logically related, as in bittersweet memories above (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014, pp. 56–57).

¹¹ Example taken from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (III, iii, 171) and quoted in Cuddon (1977/2013, p. 505).

¹² Cruse (2010, p. 167) claims that a converse can be regarded as three-place if the relational predicate it denotes consists of three arguments (e.g., lend:borrow: “A borrowed B from C/C lent B to A”). He further argues that buy:sell are arguably four-place converses since they involve four arguments (e.g., “John sold the car to Bill for £5,000/Bill bought the car from John for £5,000”).

¹³ As argued by Cruse (2004/2010, p. 167), “the directional nature of some converse pairs … is pretty hard to discern, … although it is perhaps not completely absent.”

¹⁴ The conjunction “and” is not essential (e.g., for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer). The same holds for the constructions in (37) and (38) below.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; Gobierno de España, grants [PID2020-118349GB-I00] and [FFI2017-82730-P].