Cognitive Linguistics 22–2 (2011), 359–392A foundational goal of cognitive linguistics is to explain linguistic phenomena
in terms of general cognitive strategies rather than postulating an autonomous
language module (Langacker 1987: 12–13). Metonymy is identified among the
imaginative capacities of cognition (Langacker 1993: 30, 2009: 46 – 47).
Whereas the majority of scholarship on metonymy has focused on lexical metonymy,
this study explores the systematic presence of metonymy in word-formation.
stems, affixes, and the words they form can be analyzed in terms of metonymy,
and that this analysis yields a better, more insightful classification than traditional
descriptions of word-formation. I present a metonymic classification of
suffixal word-formation in three languages: Russian, Czech, and Norwegian.
The system of classification is designed to maximize comparison between
lexical and word-formational metonymy. This comparison supports another
central claim of cognitive linguistics, namely that grammar (in this case wordformation)
and lexicon form a continuum (Langacker 1987: 18–19), since I
show that metonymic relationships in the two domains can be described in
nearly identical terms. While many metonymic relationships are shared across
the lexical and grammatical domains, some are specific to only one domain,
and the two domains show different preferences for source and target concepts.
Furthermore, I find that the range of metonymic relationships expressed in
word-formation is more diverse than what has been found in lexical metonymy.
There is remarkable similarity in word-formational metonymy across the three
languages, despite their typological differences, though they all show some
degree of language-specific behavior as well. Although this study is limited to
three Indo-European languages, the goal is to create a classification system
that could be implemented ( perhaps with modifications) across a wider spectrum
of languages.
