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Article published In:
Living Metaphors and Metonymies
Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 20:1] 2022
► pp. 172–194

Forty years of metonymy

The time-measurement pseudo-partitive construction in English

ORCID logo | University of Córdoba
This study contributes to the existing body of research that aims at showing the impact of metonymy in grammar. In this case, new evidence will be provided by exploring the English pseudo-partitive construction of time measurement, illustrated by ten years of marriage. By using corpus data, it will be shown that metonymy is at work in many instantiations of this construction. The second noun in these expressions should prima facie be semantically eligible for time measurement, that is, a temporal entity or a second-order entity. However, this is not the only type of noun that appears in the second noun slot, which can also be occupied by first and third-order entities as well as places. The presence of an expression of time-measurement in the first part of the construction coerces different ontological categories into a second-order reading and can be regarded as a guide for the correct interpretation when the second noun includes several facets, illustrating the cognitive process of cueing.
Keywords: pseudo-partitives, metonymy, ontological categories, facetization, cueing, constructions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Cognitive operations: Metonymy, facetization, zone activation and parametrization
    • 2.2Semantic categories
  • 3.A case study: Facetization in the time-measurement pseudo-partitive construction
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2What are pseudo-partitives?
    • 3.3Analysis and discussion
      • 3.3.1Numeral + Time-N1 of + N2 (Second-order entity, Time)
      • 3.3.2Numeral + Time-N1 of + N2 (First-order entity)
      • 3.3.3Numeral + Time-N1 of + N2 (Place)
      • 3.3.4Third-order entities
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00106.mun
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