The role of metonymy in complex tropes

This chapter, following preliminary work in Herrero (2009), adds to Lakoff’s (1987) taxonomy of icms other so-called figures of speech or tropes (often disregarded within Cognitive Linguistics) such as irony, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism. These figures are icms refined to create specific meaning effects, and can be divided into: (i) simple (models in which the generation of additional meanings is built upon propositional icms), and (ii) complex (tropes in which the creation of extra meaning is based on a representational, non-propositional, model). The present chapter studies the role of metonymy in producing the extra meaning effects conveyed by some complex tropes, in terms of both the cognitive operations associated with metonymy and its pragmatic implications.