Contiguity of meanings or metonymy

Contiguity of meanings or metonymy may be described as a semantic process of associating two referents, one of which makes part of the other or is closely connected with it. For example, tongue ‘the organ of speech’ in the meaning of ‘language’, bench in the meaning of ‘judges’, because it was on the bench that the judges used to sit in law courts.

A metonymy is a transfer of name based on the association of contiguity. It is a shift of names between things that are known to be connected in reality. The transfer may be conditioned by causal, spatial, temporal, symbolic, instrumental, functional, partitive and other relations. According to this we distinguish different types of metonymy: causal, spatial or local, temporal, attributive metonymy and synecdoche as a type of metonymy.

Causal metonymy is based on the causal relationship between the Subject (S), Object (O), Instrument (Instr) and Result (R) of the Action (Act). So we can distinguish different models of causal metonymy; for example:

M 1: S ® O: mackintosh, sandwich; here the name of the inventor of this object is transferred to the object made by him;

M 2: Instr ® O: hand (handwriting).

M 3: Instr ® S: violin ( the musician who plays the violin).

Spatial or local metonymy is based on the relationship of the place and its contents;

M1: place ® people: the chair (the chairman, the teachers of the department);

M 2: geographic place ® the goods exported or originated from there: bikini, china, boston, tweed.

Temporal metonymy is based on the relationship between the time and the events which occurred at that time or the people who lived then:

M 1: time ® event: the 4^th of July (the Day of Independence in the USA);

M 2: event ® time: Christmas (the 25^th of December).

Attributive metonymy is based on the relationship between the attribute and the object or subject possessing it:

M 1: attribute ® subject: beauty (a pretty girl); the crown (monarchy);

Synecdoche is based on the partitive relationship between the whole and its part:

M 1: pars pro toto (the name of a part is applied for the whole): foot (for infantry); here we observe generalization of meaning;

M 2: toto pro pars (the name of the whole is applied for its part): keel (OE cēōl ‘ship’® keel ‘a lower part of the hull); here we observe specialization of meaning.

We shall discuss these processes later.

Linguistic metaphor and metonymy are different from metaphor and metonymy as literary devices or figures of speech, or tropes. When the latter is offered and accepted both the author an the reader are aware that reference is figurative, that the object has another has another name. The poetic metaphor is the fruit of the author’s creative imagination.

In a linguistic metaphor, especially when it is dead as a result of long usage, the thing named often has no other name. In a dead metaphor the comparison is completely forgotten as, for example, in such expressions as a sun beam or a beam of light; here the metaphor cannot be explained by the allusion to a tree, although the word beam is derived from the OE beam ‘tree’; cf. Germ Baum.

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