Publications
Publication details [#10294]
Steen, Gerard J. 2005. Review of René Dirven and Ralf Pörings. 2003. 'Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast'. Cognitive Linguistics Research 20. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 606 pages. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (4) : 573–576.
Publication type
Review/summary
Publication language
English
Keywords
Abstract
This book is the paperback edition of a hardback version published in 2002 in the Cognitive Linguistics Research series, and it is now sold as a 'Mouton Reader'. On the back of the book, the publisher advertises the volume as an elaboration of Roman Jakobson's idea that metaphor and metonymy are the manifestions of two fundamentally distinct cognitive processes. However, the elaboration does not pursue the traditional structuralist approach to this opposition, but instead invokes the relatively new approach of cognitive linguistics. With the recent resurgence of metonymy in cognitive linguistics as a figure of thought that may be even more fundamental than metaphor, it is the aim of René Dirven and Ralf Pörings' collection of chapters to compare and contrast the two figures as distinct but often interacting modes of thought. The editors' attempt to frame the relatively autonomous rise of metonymy in cognitive linguistics in a more wide-ranging view of the study of metaphor and emtonymy is a welcome contribution to the field. (Gerard Steen)