Chapter published in:
Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi
[Figurative Thought and Language 9] 2020
► pp. 283–308

The metonymic exploitation of descriptive, attitudinal, and regulatory scenarios in meaning making

| University of La Rioja
| University of Almería

This chapter accounts for the different outcomes resulting from the exploitation of different kinds of situational cognitive models (scenarios). Starting from Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera’s (2014) taxonomy of cognitive models, we take a step further by subdividing scenarios into descriptive, attitudinal, and regulatory types. It is our contention that the kind of scenario involved constrains the inferential mechanisms activated at the pragmatic levels, which are supported by metonymic activity in the form of metonymic expansion plus metonymic reduction. How such processes can motivate the various formal aspects of constructions is discussed with reference to Kay and Fillmore’s (1999) well-known description of the What’s X Doing Y? construction. This chapter also shows the connections between Langacker’s profile-base relations and the metonymic exploitation of the different kinds of scenarios.

Keywords: metonymic chains, pragmatic inference, profile, base
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Lexical Constructional Model (LCM)
  • 3.Cognitive models
  • 4.Cognitive operations: Metonymy and metonymic chains
    • 4.1Metonymy: Expansion and reduction mechanisms
    • 4.2Metonymic chains
  • 5.Profile-base relations
  • 6.Scenarios, metonymic activity and pragmatic inference
    • 6.1Descriptive scenarios
    • 6.2Attitudinal scenarios
    • 6.3Regulatory scenarios
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.9.12rui
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