Metonymy of Aspect/Aspects of Metonymy

Abstract

Ever since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) published their seminal monograph Metaphors We Live By, metaphor has been a cornerstone in cognitive linguistics, while metonymy has received less attention. However, recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in metonymy (Peirsman and Geeraerts 2006 and Croft 2006), and it is therefore natural to ask what the role of metonymy is in grammatical systems and how metonymy interacts with metaphor in such systems. The present paper sheds light on these questions on the basis of an analysis of Russian aspect, which Janda (2004 and 2007) has analyzed in terms of metaphor. I argue that metonymy relates the submeanings of the perfective aspect (section 3), that metonymy is pivotal in the relations among submeanings of the imperfective aspect (section 4), and - following Janda (2008) - that the relations between imperfective and perfective verbs involve metonymy (section 5). I propose that metaphor and metonymy are complementary in the Russian aspectual system; metaphor relates events to matter (objects and substances), while metonymy connects different types of events to each other (section 6). Before we turn to metonymy and its interaction with metaphor, it is necessary to define metaphor and metonymy and clarify the role of metaphor in Russian aspect (sections 1 and 2).