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In:New Vistas in Research on Metaphor and Metonymy: Their contexts and interaction across discourse types and modalities
Edited by Robert Kiełtyka, Mario Brdar, Marcin Kudła and Goran Milić
[Human Cognitive Processing 82] 2027
► pp. 182–213

Chapter 7
Metonymic chameleons, snowballs, and slices

Towards the 3D model of metonymy

 | University of Osijek
 | Eötvös Loránd UniversityBudapest
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
In this chapter we study metonymies as they interact in discourse, expanding on the framework developed in Brdar-Szabó & Brdar (2011) and Brdar & Brdar-Szabó (2025), and focusing on what metonymic chains reveal about the nature of metonymy. Our main goal is to demonstrate that metonymic chains are different from metaphoric chains with respect to the dynamicity vs. the constancy meaning of the chained elements. While the meaning of metaphors in a chain tends to remain constant as the chain evolves, the situation with textual metonymic chains is very different: the meaning of these metonymies is dynamically construed and often fluctuates, oscillates, or keeps picking up new elements as the chain develops, as demonstrated on three case studies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Differences between conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy
    • 2.1Some major differences
    • 2.2Some subsidiary points of difference
  • 3.Metonymic chains
    • 3.1Metonymic tiers vs. metonymic chains
    • 3.2Metaphoric chains vs metonymic chains: Another point of difference
  • 4.Case studies on dynamic meaning construal by means of metonymy (as a sequential scanning device)
    • 4.1Metonymic chameleons
    • 4.2Metonymic snowballs
    • 4.3Metonymic slices: From the Robert de Niro of Taxi Driver to the Robert de Niro of The Dirty Grandpa
  • 5.Some brief concluding remarks
  • Author queries
  • References
References (92)
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