Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing

Book excerpt: In recent years, conceptual metonymy has been recognized as a cognitive phenomenon that is as fundamental as metaphor for reasoning and the construction of meaning. The thoroughly revised chapters in the present volume originated as presentations in a workshop organized by the editors for the 7th International Pragmatics Conference held in Budapest in 2000. They constitute, according to an anonymous reviewer, "an interesting contribution to both cognitive linguistics and pragmatics." The contributions aim to bridge the gap, and encourage discussion, between cognitive linguists and scholars working in a pragmatic framework. Topics include the metonymic basis of explicature and implicature, the role of metonymically-based inferences in speech act and discourse interpretation, the pragmatic meaning of grammatical constructions, the impact of metonymic mappings on and their interaction with grammatical structure, the role of metonymic inferencing and implicature in linguistic change, and the comparison of metonymic principles across languages and different cultural settings.