Metonymy and word-formation revisited

Abstract

Brdar and Brdar-Szabó (this volume) offer a critique of Janda (2011). Janda (2011) found that the same cognitive strategy that facilitates metonymy, namely use of a conceptual source to access a target, can also be invoked in many patterns of affixal word-formation. In other words, many cases of word-formation appear to be motivated by metonymic association. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó claim that it is incorrect to refer to word-formational processes as metonymies. In addition to the robust parallels evidenced in my data, I offer three arguments to defend my use of the term “metonymy”: (1) a broader definition of metonymy facilitates more insightful generalizations; (2) there is no fixed boundary between lexical metonymy and word-formational metonymy since they coexist in the lexicon-grammar continuum; and (3) context, whether it be a suffix or other cues, is always a factor in metonymy.