Metonymy and metaphor in grammar. Ed. by Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda L. Thornburg, and Antonio Barcelona. (Human cognitive processing 25.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. viii, 423. ISBN 9789027223791. $149 (Hb).
Reviewed by Siaw-Fong Chung and Heng-ming Kang, National Chengchi University

The editors hint that an important notion of this book is ‘how figurative thought might influence grammar’ (1) and how one’s grammar structure could be ‘motivated … by conceptual-pragmatic factors’ (4). Ronald W. Langacker presents several grammatical structures (e.g. prepositional phrase constructional schema) using metonymic representations. Several important concepts such as ‘active zones’ of a ‘profiled relation’ (48), reference points (52), and buried connections (61) are introduced.

In Part 1, ‘Word class meaning and word formation’, Wiltrud Mihatsch tries to find evidence in Indo-European languages to confirm Langacker’s idea that ‘all nouns … are conceptualized as THING’ (75). Margarida Basilio explains how ‘metonymic processes’ are required to understand nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (e.g. from an OBJECT, piano, to an ACTIVITY performed with the object) (103). The formation of agent nouns with [[X]-ista] constructions that ‘denote people with reference to political, theoretical, or religious bodies of ideas’ is one example (106). Gary B. Palmer, Russell S. Rader, and Art D. Clarito state that ka- in Tagalog serves a similar function as English -er/-or when ‘denoting an agent or instrument’ (111), and the semantics of this morpheme could be understood metonymically.
In Part 2, ‘Case and aspect’, Wolfgang Schulze uses the local cases of the East Caucasian languages Aghul and the Udi as examples to discuss how their understanding requires metaphorization. Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg argue that a chain of metonymy and metaphor meanings is required to understand the French passé simple to be ‘a past tense with a perfective sense’ (192).

In Part 3, ‘Proper names and noun phrases’, Günter Radden tries to approach the English generic reference from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, comparing the representative generic (indefinite singular), the proportional generic (indefinite plural), the kind generic (definite singular), and the delimited generic (definite plural). Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó argue that the adverbial replacements for metonymic subjects are metonymic, which involves a two-tiered metonymy, PART FOR WHOLE and CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT. Mario Brdar later investigates two metonymic cases, WHOLE FOR PART in animal grinding and woods and MANNER FOR ACTION in predicative adjectives.

In Part 4, ‘Predicate and clause constructions’, Rosario Caballero relies on a corpus of collected architecture magazines to investigate motion predicates, especially when used in architectural discourse as opposed to general context. Debra Ziegeler and Sarah Lee propose a metonymic three-stage process of grammaticalization to account for the development from causative-resultatives to conventionalized scenarios in Singaporean, Malaysian, and British English. Rita Brdar-Szabó finds out that in English and German, stand-alone conditionals can serve as indirect directives, but this is not the case in Hungarian and Croatian.

Finally, in Part 5, ‘Metonymic and metaphoric motivations of grammatical meaning’, M. Sandra Peña Cervel and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez focus on two image-schemas—the path-end-of-path transformation and the multiplex-mass transformation. Antonio Barcelona observes different types of prototypical and non-prototypical constructions in a corpus of short, constructed conversations. One’s knowledge of the grammatical constructions will provide the background for metonymic inference.