Abstract
Abstract Metonymy of a predicate, in which the source event implies the target event, is called predicational metonymy. This paper focused on a Japanese productive predicational metonymy, action for causation, and described its linguistic preference in terms of aspectual construal based on a corpus-driven quantitative investigation. The results revealed that an event that is bounded and durative is preferred as the metonymic vehicle in action for causation metonymy. The two cognitive principles, bounded over unbounded and durative over punctual, were proposed to explain the linguistic preference. It was suggested that the two principles can be subsumed under the fundamental cognitive principle of good Gestalt over poor Gestalt, and that this general principle governs metonymic preference of both predicates and nominal phrases.
Highlights
With the advent of cognitive linguistics, it has been understood that metonymic expressions manifest a basic linguistic strategy to express our thought effectively
What principles govern metonymic preference at the level of predicates? In Section 3, we observed that an event that is bounded and durative is preferred as the vehicle of ACTION FOR CAUSATION
From a quantitative analysis of ACTION FOR CAUSATION metonymy in Japanese in terms of aspectual construal, we found that
Summary
With the advent of cognitive linguistics, it has been understood that metonymic expressions manifest a basic linguistic strategy to express our thought effectively. Metonymy is “a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model” (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 21). The ham sandwich in The ham sandwich is waiting for his check metonymically stands for the person who ate the ham sandwich. In this respect, nominal phrases have been the primary target of linguistic research on metonymy. There has been a growing interest in metonymic processes in other aspects of language structure, such as predicates (Panther and Thornburg 2000; 2003c; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández 2003) and speech acts
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