The role of metonymy in complex tropes

Cognitive operations and pragmatic implications

Javier Herrero Ruiz

This chapter, following preliminary work in Herrero (2009), adds to Lakoff’s (1987) taxonomy of icms other so-called figures of speech or tropes (often disregarded within Cognitive Linguistics) such as irony, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism. These figures are icms refined to create specific meaning effects, and can be divided into: (i) simple (models in which the generation of additional meanings is built upon propositional icms), and (ii) complex (tropes in which the creation of extra meaning is based on a representational, non-propositional, model). The present chapter studies the role of metonymy in producing the extra meaning effects conveyed by some complex tropes, in terms of both the cognitive operations associated with metonymy and its pragmatic implications.

Keywords: cognitive operations, figure of speech, Idealized Cognitive Model (icm), pragmatic implication, trope

Published online: 24 June 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.28.09her

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Athanasiadou, Angeliki

2017. In Irony in Language Use and Communication [Figurative Thought and Language, 1], ► pp. 201 ff.

Barnden, John

2018. In Conceptual Metonymy [Human Cognitive Processing, 60], ► pp. 97 ff.

Galera Masegosa, Alicia

2020. The role of echoing in meaning construction and interpretation. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 18:1 ► pp. 19 ff.

Zhang, Weiwei, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts

2015. Cross-linguistic variation in metonymies for PERSON. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 220 ff.

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