In recent years, conceptual metonymy has been recognized as a cognitive phenomenon that is as fundamental as metaphor for reasoning and the construction of meaning. The thoroughly revised chapters in the present volume originated as presentations in a workshop organized by the editors for the 7th International Pragmatics Conference held in Budapest in 2000. They constitute, according to an anonymous reviewer, "an interesting contribution to both cognitive linguistics and pragmatics." The contributions aim to bridge the gap, and encourage discussion, between cognitive linguists and scholars working in a pragmatic framework. Topics include the metonymic basis of explicature and implicature, the role of metonymically-based inferences in speech act and discourse interpretation, the pragmatic meaning of grammatical constructions, the impact of metonymic mappings on and their interaction with grammatical structure, the role of metonymic inferencing and implicature in linguistic change, and the comparison of metonymic principles across languages and different cultural settings.

Table of contents

List of contributors ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: On the nature of conceptual metonymy Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg 1–20 Part I. The place of metonymy in cognition and pragmatics Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Lorena Pérez Hernández 23–49 Metonymy and conceptual blending Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley 51–79 The case for a metonymic basis of pragmatic inferencing: Evidence from jokes and funny anecdotes Antonio Barcelona 81–102 Part II. Metonymic inferencing and grammatical structure A construction-based approach to indirect speech acts Anatol Stefanowitsch 105–126 Metonymies as natural inference and activation schemas: The case of dependent clauses as independent speech acts Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg 127–147 Metonymic pathways to neuter-gender human nominals in German Klaus-Michael Köpcke and David A. Zubin 149–166 Part III. Metonymic inferencing and linguistic change The development of counterfactual implicatures in English: A case of metonymy or M-inference? Debra Ziegeler 169–203 Metonymy and pragmatic inference in the functional reanalysis of grammatical morphemes in Japanese Shigeko Okamoto 205–220 Part IV. Metonymic inferencing across languages Metonymic construals of shopping requests in have- and be-languages Günter Radden and Ken-ichi Seto 223–239 Metonymic coding of linguistic action in English, Croatian and Hungarian Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó 241–266 Name index 267–269 Metonymy and metaphor index 271–273 Subject index 275–280