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Conceptual Metonymy: Methodological, theoretical, and descriptive issues
Edited by Olga Blanco-Carrión, Antonio Barcelona and Rossella Pannain
[Human Cognitive Processing 60] 2018
► pp. 261–286

Chapter 10
Are smartphone face and Googleheads a real or a fake phenomenon?

The current role of metonymy in semantic exocentricity

| Universidad de Córdoba

This paper seeks to provide evidence of the pervasiveness of metonymy as a resource triggering the creation of examples of a remnant category in morphological research, so-called ‘exocentric’ compounds. Exocentricity is not a homogeneous phenomenon in English, where it is typically represented by bahuvrihi compounds, which refer to an entity via a salient property on the basis of the metonymy part for whole. This research starts up with the collection of a corpus of over 300 English compounds with a body-part noun as the right component. As a result of the search, some regions of productivity will be shown to exist, not only by the creation of new instantiations of existing patterns but also by the emergence of new subtypes.

Keywords: bahuvrihi compounds, body-part nouns, exocentricity, metonymy, possessive compounds, productivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exocentricity in English?
  • 3.The scope of this work: Semantic exocentricity
  • 4.Methodology and discussion
    • 4.1Possessive compounds
      • 4.1.1The case of -head formations
      • 4.1.2Other body-part formations
    • 4.2Ailment descriptors
      • 4.2.1‘Diagnosis’ compounds
      • 4.2.2‘Symptomatic’ compounds
      • 4.2.3Personality traits
    • 4.3Other inanimate formations
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 17 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.60.10por
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