Metonymy and cognitive operations

Abstract

This chapter begins with a distinction made in Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña (2005) between two broad kinds of cognitive operations: formal and content operations. The former are higher-level processes whose activity is necessary for lower-level processes to take place. The latter are used to make inferences on the basis of cues provided by the linguistic expression and its context. The chapter proposes that metonymy can be broken down into two content operations, domain expansion and domain reduction, the latter of which can be further broken down into other two processes: facetization and zone activation. It then explores how these operations relate to or contrast with other content operations and the way in which they are supported by formal operations.

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