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In:Conceptual Metonymy: Methodological, theoretical, and descriptive issues
Edited by Olga Blanco-Carrión, Antonio Barcelona and Rossella Pannain
[Human Cognitive Processing 60] 2018
► pp. 121–160

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Chapter 5
What kind of reasoning mode is metonymy?

 | University of Hamburg
 | Independent Scholar
Published online: 17 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.60.05pan
Abstract
In this chapter we present new arguments for a conception of metonymy as a contingent, i.e. defeasible, inferential relation between a source and a target sense within the same conceptual frame. Some scholars have raised objections against our approach to metonymy, claiming that there exist entailment-based metonymies. We demonstrate that the “counterexamples” in support of this thesis are in fact not entailments but cancelable inferences based on encyclopedic knowledge. We develop an account of metonymy inspired by the Peircean concept of abduction, a mode of reasoning that is pervasive in both scientific and everyday inferencing. Finally, we propose a distinction between default and incongruence-based metonymies and point out some parallelisms between metonymies and Gricean conversational implicatures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Properties of metonymy
    • 2.1The basic metonymic relation
    • 2.2Metonymy as an associative and indexical relation
    • 2.3Situation, context and conceptual frame components
    • 2.4Experiential and sociocultural grounding of metonymy
    • 2.5Contiguity
    • 2.6Contingency
      • 2.6.1Entailment and metonymy
      • 2.6.2Intrinsic frame features as metonymic targets
      • 2.6.3Taxonomic relations and metonymy
      • 2.6.4Coercion
    • 2.7Target orientation of metonymy
    • 2.8Metonymy as a source-in-target operation
    • 2.9Pragmatic effects
    • 2.10Pragmatic types of metonymy
  • 3.Three modes of reasoning
    • 3.1Deduction
    • 3.2Induction
    • 3.3Abduction
    • 3.4Interim conclusion
  • 4.Metonymy as an abductive reasoning strategy
  • 5.Metonymy and implicature
    • 5.1Cancelability/defeasibility
    • 5.2Reinforceability
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (66)
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