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Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 15:1 (2025) ► pp.1–26

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The role of metonymy in social identity

ORCiD logo with link | The Open University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with The Open University.

Published online: 27 January 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.23029.dil
Abstract
In this study the role of metonymy in relation to social identity is investigated in naturally occurring internet discourse of social groups. Two Reddit subreddits banned for promoting hate based on identity are compared with two unbanned subreddits that predominantly relate to the same gender-focused concerns. It is found that metonymies to reference social identity are more prevalent in the two banned subreddits, where they represent both social in-groups, and out-groups. Analysis of their use in conjunction with other variables identified as having psychological significance finds that each metonymy has a particular role and psychological characterisation. And consideration of diachronic change in the prevalence and cooccurrence of the metonymies provides insights into the evolution of the identity and concerns of the groups. It is concluded that metonymies at the group level support access to and reification of evolving group-specific conceptualisations, and that this in turn supports group identity. Considering metonymies of social groups in large corpora may thus support understanding of group-specific attitudes, and their evolution over time, including in relation to potential hatefulness of discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Ethical considerations
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Natural language processing
    • 3.2Metonymy identification
      • 3.2.1Keyword analysis
    • 3.3Psychologically relevant variables
      • 3.3.1Emotional valence
      • 3.3.2Personal pronouns
      • 3.3.3Entropy
    • 3.4Diachronic analysis
    • 3.5Factor analysis
    • 3.6Supervised machine learning classification
    • 3.7Network analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Keyword metonymies of social identities in each group
      • 4.1.1r/GenderCritical
      • 4.1.2r/Feminism
      • 4.1.3r/MGTOW
      • 4.1.4r/MensRights
    • 4.2How are the metonymies used?
      • 4.2.1r/GenderCritical collocates of keyword metonymies
      • 4.2.2r/MGTOW collocates of keyword metonymies
    • 4.3How distinct is the psychological characterisation of the metonymies
      • 4.3.1r/GenderCritical
      • 4.3.2r/MGTOW
    • 4.4How are the metonymies used over time
      • 4.4.1r/GenderCritical relationships between metonymies over time
      • 4.4.2r/MGTOW relationships between metonymies
  • 5.Discussion
  • References
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