‘Not one word of it made any sense’: Hyperbolic synecdoche in the British National Corpus<sup>1</sup>

Abstract

A distinct metonymic pattern was discovered in the course of conducting a corpus-based study of figurative uses of WORD . The pattern involved examples such as Not one word of it made any sense and I agree with every word . It was labelled ‘hyperbolic synecdoche’, defined as a case in which a lexeme which typically refers to part of an entity (a) is used to stand for the whole entity and (b) is described with reference to the end point on a scale. Specifically, the speaker/writer selects the perspective of a lower-level unit (such as word for ‘utterance’), which is quantified as NOTHING or ALL, thus forming a subset of ‘extreme case formulations’. Hyperbolic synecdoche was found to exhibit a restricted range of lexicogrammatical patterns involving word , with the negated NOTHING patterns being considerably more common than the ALL patterns. The phenomenon was shown to be common in metonymic uses in general, constituting one-fifth of all cases of metonymy in word . The examples of hyperbolic synecdoche were found not to be covered by the oft- quoted ‘abbreviation’ rationale for metonymy; instead, they represent a more roundabout way of expression. It is shown that other cases of hyperbolic synecdoche exist outside of word and the domain of communication (such as ‘time’ and ‘money’).