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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 15:1 (2017) ► pp.183–223

On constructional blocking of metonymies

A cross-linguistic view

| University of Osijek
| ELTE, Budapest

The interaction between metonymy and grammar is commonly understood, in keeping with the classical cognitive linguistic doctrine about cognitive operations motivating linguistic structures, as unilateral – conceptual metaphor and metonymy shaping the grammatical system. However, we argue in this article that one of the possible corollaries of the Equipollence Hypothesis (Mairal & Ruiz de Mendoza, 2009; Ruiz de Mendoza & Luzondo Oyón, 2012) covers a truly bilateral interaction between grammatical structures and cognitive processes. The Equipollence Hypothesis is shown to allow for grammatical phenomena facilitating or constraining, i.e. blocking, the application of conceptual metonymies and their expressions across domains of linguistic inquiry. Specifically, we show in four case studies that grammatical constructions may actually pre-empt lexical (and grammatical) metonymy.

Keywords: metonymy, construction, Equipollence Hypothesis, blocking, synonymy, grammar, possessive construction, causative construction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: On the interaction between metonymy and grammar
  • 2.The Equipollence Hypothesis and metonymy blocking
  • 3.Constructional blocking of metonymy
    • 3.1Metonymy blocked by word-formation constructions: The case of object-material metonymies
    • 3.2Predicative possessive constructions
    • 3.3The controller for controlled metonymy and causative constructions
      • 3.3.1The anatomy of this metonymy
      • 3.3.2 controller for controlled/causative metonymy across languages
    • 3.4Papers in papers
  • 4.Some concluding remarks about the blocking of metonymy by grammar
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 4 September 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.1.08brd
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