Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This book contains papers presented at a theme session of the tenth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Cracow, Poland, 2007), with some additionally solicited articles from leading metonymy experts. Tackling essential issues of metonymy and with original approach, the book focuses on ‘(i) delimiting the notion of metonymy…, (ii) clarifying the points of divergence between the various contributors with respect to this notion, and (iii) suggesting a consensus view which will hopefully have reverberations in both the Cognitive Linguistics community and the linguistics community at large’ (3).

Following an introduction by the editors, which provides the background, aim, and structure of the book, a contribution by Antonio Barcelona critically reviews a number of controversial issues in the metonymy research arena, elaborates his own prototype-based redefinition and classification of metonymy, and discusses the distinction between metonymy and metaphor.

Part 1 of the book addresses metonymy and related semantic and rhetorical issues. It begins with a chapter by Carita Paradis, devoted to the relevance of metonymy to explaining the mechanisms of how lexical items activate and/or acquire new meanings. Specifically, the chapter focuses on two key mechanisms: metonymization and zone activation. Both are construals involving PART-WHOLE configurations, and the difference between them is that the former operates between senses, while the latter operates within senses. Dirk Geeraerts and Yves Peirsman clarify the terminological confusion between metonymy, profile/zone discrepancy, and facetization. Through syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis, they conclude that facetization is a special type of metonymy in that it involves reference shift, a feature which is lacking in zone activation and thus renders it non-metonymical. Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez argues that facetization and zone activation are two processes of domain reduction, which is one of the two content operations of metonymy, the other one being domain expansion. In revealing the cognitive mechanism of vertical polysemy, Anu Koskela distinguishes category broadening and narrowing from metonymy based on the fact that, besides involving different domain structures, the latter involves a shift in the salience of domains while the former does not.

The final two chapters of Part 1 apply metonymy to the analysis of complex tropes: Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić and Goran Milić explore metonymic inference and pragmatic functions of euphemisms and dysphemisms in political discourse; and Javier Herrero Ruiz analyzes more tropes such as irony, oxymoron, overstatement, and understatement, repositioning them as idealized cognitive models and examining how their construction and interpretation rely on the operation of metonymy.

The chapters in Part 2 treat metonymy or metonymic chains as operations in domain networks/matrices. This argument is confirmed in the chapter by Réka Benczes, where he draws evidence from compounds. Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar point out that metonymy should be viewed as ‘a discourse-driven inference or pragmatic function….arising in the course of domain expansion or reduction’ (245) instead of mapping. Focusing on indirect speech acts, Xianglan Chen refines the notion of domain matrix by proposing a more dynamic model, incorporating metonymic triggers such as our background knowledge, the immediate context, and individual pragmatic factors.