9 ‘These huts did absolutely unbelievable work’ What do we now know about metonymy?
9.1 Introduction
In this book, we have seen that metonymic thinking is an everyday process which plays a key role in helping us make sense of the world. Because of this, metonymy features in all forms of communication, where it performs a wide range of functions. We have also seen that a focus on metonymy has the potential to provide new insights into the ways in which we communicate in language as well as in other modes of communication. In this chapter, I sum up what we now know about metonymy, showing how this knowledge takes us well beyond ‘traditional’ views. I then briefly outline a few things that we still do not know about metonymy, and suggest new avenues for research, with a focus on real-world applications.
9.2 What do we now know about metonymy?
Traditional accounts of metonymy have focused mainly on its referential function and have looked at how it works in language, mainly relying on examples where the metonymy is in the noun group. In this book, we have seen that it is more appropriate to adopt a broader definition of metonymy than this, move beyond its referential functions and explore the role that it plays in real-world communication. When we look at metonymy in this way, we can see that it has a number of characteristics that show it to be a far more interesting and unpredictable phenomenon than one might think. Taken together, these characteristics show that metonymy works just as hard as metaphor and that it does just as many things as metaphor. Some of the main characteristics of metonymy follow.
Metonymy is not just found in language
Although it is often described as a ‘figure of speech’, metonymy does not just exist in language. It is a key component of our thinking processes and therefore finds outlets in many different forms of expression, including film, art, music, dance, sign language and gesture. By studying the ways in which it operates in these different modes of expression, we have been able to witness different features of metonymy from those that have traditionally been explored in linguistic accounts.
Metonymy serves a wide range of rhetorical functions
We have seen that metonymy serves an array of functions, such as persuasion, relationship-building, evaluation, euphemism and the expression of irony. Metonymy can also contribute to the cohesiveness of texts because of the ‘Domain Availability Principle’ and the existence of broad matrix domains. Metonymy serves subtle illocutionary functions, many of which do not transfer seamlessly across languages. There are numerous discourse-community-specific uses of metonymy, such as the dentist’s receptionist who calls to the dentist ‘your 3.30 toothache is here’, or the father on the touchline at the children’s football match who shouts to his son ‘stand on it’. The meanings of these metonymies may not always be apparent to people outside those particular discourse communities, or even people, such as the young football players, who are still in the process of being initiated into the discourse communities. We have also seen metonymy being used in the service of euphemism and dysphemism, hyperbole, creative language play and humour. It plays a key role in vague language and all the subtle nuances that vague language is used to perform. Finally, we have seen examples of metonymy being used for ideology and positioning, particularly by politicians, but also in other contexts, such as everyday communication and even literature. In addition to performing all of these functions, metonymy serves as a key device in meaning extension in both spoken and sign language as well as in other modes of artistic expression.
Metonymy is often used playfully and creatively and for humorous effect
Traditionally, it has been argued that, unlike metaphor, metonymy tends to draw on existing relationships, rather than creating new ones. However, we have seen in this volume that metonymy plays a key role in creative expression. It has the potential to be involved in the creation of new relationships, especially in art where items are unexpectedly juxtaposed to create new meaning and to help us see things in radically different ways, and to question our assumptions about the world. Metonymy is often involved in ‘playful’ activity, not just in language but in all forms of expression. The contrast between the literal and metonymic meanings of words and concepts is often used as a creative and/or humorous device. Another feature of metonymy which allows it to be involved in creative language play and humour is the fact that, like metaphor, it can involve multiple mappings between the source and target domain, and these mappings can be very complex. This complexity means that people play with metonymy at least as much as they play with metaphor.
Metonymy can be found in many different parts of speech
When we look at traditional accounts of metonymy in the literature, we see that the examples used are nearly always nouns, and that they nearly always occur in head position, such as the now-famous ‘ham sandwich on Table 6’ example. However, when we look at metonymy in real-world data, we see that it appears in a wide range of parts of speech besides the noun. Metonymy allows people to have ‘round table’ discussions, ‘walk up the aisle’, ‘hoover up’ and have ‘healthy diets’. As we can see in these examples, metonymies are by no means always the nouns, although the artificially created examples that are discussed in the literature often are.
Metonymy extends beyond the level of the word
Metonymy can operate well beyond the level of the individual word. It is often very difficult to say where exactly the metonymy sits in a sentence, and metonymic meaning is rarely attached to just one particular word. Rather, metonymic meaning tends to hover over a sentence or a phrase. Metonymy can also serve as an important form of cohesion across a whole text or speech or even a whole book. This is also true of metonymy in other forms of communication. In music, brief metonymic episodes can refer to entire musical genres, and in film and theatre a whole scene can operate as a single metonymy.
Metonymy is subtle and flexible
The final important thing to say about metonymy is that its meanings can be extremely flexible and open to interpretation. Metonymic meaning relies very heavily on context and shared experience. The subtle nature of metonymy means that it provides a useful tool to speakers who may not want to be entirely specific about exactly what it is that they are talking about, as we saw in Chapter 5, where the speaker referred to ‘Longfield Terrace’ to refer obliquely to a series of the traumatic events that took place there during his childhood. This flexibility, combined with the fact that shared background knowledge is often required to access the intended meaning, explains why metonymy plays such a key role in the building and negotiating of relationships.
9.3 What do we still not know about metonymy and how might metonymy research continue to be used in the ‘real world’?
Despite these gains in our knowledge about metonymy, there are still a number of unanswered questions. Moreover, we have seen that metonymy has a large number of potential real-world applications – particularly in the areas of psychological counselling, education, translation studies, advertising and inter-cultural communication – but there have to date been no studies of the actual contribution that an awareness of metonymy might make in these areas. In this section, I outline those areas where more research into metonymy could usefully be conducted, beginning with theoretical issues and then moving out towards more practical applications.
On a theoretical level, a first concern is that we are still not very good at defining and identifying it. Much of the difficulty here derives from the similarity between metonymy and metaphor. Although much has been written on the similarities and differences between metonymy and metaphor and the relationship between them, close examination of the phenomena in real-life communication reveals a very messy situation. Because of the substantial amount of overlap between them, the clear-cut examples that are often discussed in the literature cannot be said to be representative of the phenomena as a whole, and the claims that are made about these examples may not be applicable to other less prototypical instances of metonymy, or indeed metaphor. The fact that it is often difficult to disambiguate metonymy from metaphor therefore makes it difficult to identify in language and in other forms of expression. It is also difficult to see where an instance of metonymy begins and ends, particularly in forms of expression such as music, dance and sign language, but also in language, where, as we have just seen, it operates at the level of the phrase or even of the entire text, not just at the level of the word.
A second area where theoretical knowledge is lacking is the issue of ‘novel’ versus ‘conventional’ metonymy. Many uses of metonymy are so conventional that people may not even see them as metonymy, which makes them very different from some of the highly original and creative uses of metonymy that we have seen in this book. We have seen, for example, that creative and conventional uses of metonymy are processed very differently in the mind, regardless of the mode in which they are presented, with conventional metonymy being processed in much the same way as literal language. More work needs to be done to see how these differences relate to the clines from prototypical to less prototypical metonymy that were discussed in Chapter 3. Particular attention needs to be paid to instances of metonymy that lie in the middle of the continuum. Although they may look conventional and thus be processed as such, they may well encode a particular perspective or evaluative slant that is so subtle that it will be taken at face value and not questioned by the interlocutor. Such uses of metonymy are likely to be among the most powerful forms of persuasive language.
A third under-explored theoretical issue that would benefit from more research concerns the roles played by metonymy in other modes of expression besides language. In this book, we have only really focused on a small number of modes of expression; it would be interesting to examine the ways in which metonymy operates in others, such as mime, dance and religious ritual. This last area would be particularly interesting as it would allow for a focus on the role of metonymy in the meaning-making process and in helping people address fundamental questions concerning life and death.
Metonymy research has a great many potential practical applications. The most socially relevant is the role that it plays in the development of delusions in patients with schizophrenia and related disorders. Because of the way it blends fantasy and reality metonymic thinking is a particularly pernicious phenomenon in this context. This is because it sits half way between ‘literal’ thinking and ‘metaphorical’ thinking. Although people may be used to the idea of metaphor and the fact that it is used to describe one thing in terms of another, there is much less awareness of metonymy outside the field of linguistics. Even if people have heard of it, they are often unsure as to exactly what it is. This means that they are unlikely to be aware of the role that it plays in their own thinking processes, and they may at times conflate it with ‘literal’ thinking. In psychology this is likely to be true of both patients and counsellors, making metonymy-based delusions much more difficult to identify than ones that are based on metaphor. It would therefore be helpful to make the role of metonymic thinking more explicit during counselling sessions, thus helping patients to address and confront the exact nature of some of their delusions. More research is therefore needed to explore the benefits or otherwise of focusing explicitly on metonymy during psychological counselling, and of including it in training programmes for counsellors.
Metonymy research also has the potential to contribute to the field of education. A more overt focus on metonymy would be particularly beneficial for students of language (be it their own language, or a foreign language), as it could help them to develop a clearer understanding of how language works. It could also help them to speak and write more effectively by using metonymy to perform functions such as persuasion, relationship-building, and the expression of humour and irony. We have seen that metonymy can present serious comprehension difficulties to second language learners; what we do not yet know is the extent to which learners are aware of these difficulties, and how they might be helped to overcome them. It might also be useful to focus on metonymy in subjects such as art, music, design and media studies. We have seen that many of the creative processes underlying these disciplines rely on metonymy. Even the so-called ‘hard sciences’ contain theoretical concepts that have a strong metonymic basis, and this is reflected in the terminology that is used in those disciplines. If the metonymic basis of some of this terminology were explained to students, it might improve their understanding of the concepts themselves. All academic disciplines employ metonymy to some extent in their construction of their world view, and metonymic thinking guides and influences reasoning processes in all walks of life. Nevertheless there have been very few attempts to analyse this and its implications for epistemology and interdisciplinary communication. A heightened awareness of the role played by metonymic thinking in theory construction, and of the different ways in which this process operates across disciplines could lead to improvements in communication and understanding between researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds.
The work on the role of metonymy in advertising that we saw in Chapter 5 suggests that there may be a place for a more explicit, systematic focus on multimodal metonymy by those working in advertising. At present, much of the creative work that is done in advertising is carried out in an intuitive manner, and a more systematic analysis of the metonymic thinking processes that underlie the decision-making processes employed by both advertisers and consumers could prove beneficial. Empirical studies involving informants could usefully test out the impact of metonymy on consumers’ attitudes towards the products being advertised. The findings from such research could then be used to make advertisements more effective and more targeted, and to make them work better on a psychological level.
Metonymy has the potential to make a significant contribution to inter-cultural communication and understanding. We saw in Chapter 4 how metonymy is used to create ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, and to refer to ‘others’ in less than complimentary ways. This is sometimes done inadvertently, and when this is the case it may contribute to increased levels of antagonism. As with the counselling contexts discussed above, people may be aware of metaphor and of the ways in which it is used to make sense of abstract concepts, but they are often much less aware of metonymy and the role that it plays in the development and expression of ideas. As a result, the metonymic nature of some widely discussed ideas may not be fully acknowledged. For example, in British school history lessons, children learn about the way ‘Germany’ behaved in the Second World War and the fact that ‘we’ fought the ‘Japanese’, who had a reputation for being ‘indomitable’. There is often little consideration of the metonymic basis of such claims and the fact that they are not literally true. In contemporary politics, we rarely see discussions of exactly what politicians mean when they talk about ‘the European Union’, or even ‘the economy’. Terms such as these are used as metonymic shorthand to refer to different aspects of highly complex entities. In order for any successful communication to take place, there needs to be a tacit agreement between speakers that they are being used to talk about the same thing. However, this is unlikely to be the case, particularly when the speakers have different linguistic, cultural or political backgrounds. An increased awareness of the nature, extent and power of metonymy among politicians, diplomats, businessmen and -women, translators, and others that are involved in cross-linguistic or cross-cultural communication could go some way towards improving international understanding.
Finally, we saw in Chapter 6 how important accurate metonymy resolution can be for human–computer interaction. Work on the grammatical forms of metonymy and the functions that it performs could contribute to the endeavour of metonymy recognition by machines. If computers are to interpret human language properly, then they need to be programmed to ‘understand’ that human language and communication in general is often not literal, and that perspective is always encoded in language. We have already seen that an ability to detect and comprehend metonymy improves the success rate of language ‘comprehension’ by computers, but, as with all the areas listed above, there is still much more to be done.
9.4 Conclusion
Metonymy is everywhere. It shapes the way we think and the way we influence the thoughts of others. Meaning is underspecified in all forms of communication, leaving much of the interpretative work to the reader, viewer or listener. Metonymic thinking forms the core of this interpretative work and is something that we engage in all the time in order to extract meaning from language and other forms of communication. On a recent tour of the work huts in the grounds of Bletchley Park in the UK, where the Nazi ‘enigma code’ was broken in 1941, the tour guide uttered the metonymy ‘these huts did unbelievable work’ to refer to the contribution that the (mainly female) decoders working inside those huts had made to the war effort. This relatively innocuous use of metonymy went largely unnoticed by the tour group, but the guide was able to use these six words to express a large amount of information concisely and elegantly. What the tour guide was saying about those women working in those huts in Bletchley Park is also true of metonymy. It does ‘absolutely unbelievable work’ but it tends to do so behind the scenes; it is a modest trope, and more often than not we do not even notice it. But we should.
