Chapter 11. Metonymy and the dynamics of conceptual operations in Spanish Sign Language

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting a first approach to the multilevel dynamics of metonymy in Spanish Sign Language (LSE) within Barcelona’s approach to cognitive metonymy (2000, 2002, 2005, 2011, 2015). At the same time, within this framework, we see the compatibility of the current approaches to metonymy and iconicity in signed languages (Taub 2001; Wilcox 2003, 2004). We propose a metonymic approach to the conceptualization of manual articulators and develop a three level analysis (Barcelona 2005) of three LSE examples. The examples are extracted from a corpus of cooking recipes recorded by Spanish native signers. The first results show the complex multilevel metonymic chained nature of signed meaning-form construals in LSE to be confirmed by further studies at each level.