WHAT IS METONYMY? THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS IN METONYMY RESEARCH (Mi a metonimia? Elmeletek es kiserletek a metonimiakutatasban)

For a long time metonymy was held to be a figure of speech in which a name of one concept is substituted for that of another closely associated concept. Compared to this, holistic cognitive linguistics re-evaluated the concept of metonymy. From this point of view metonymy is first of all a conceptual process, thus metonymic relations are in effect conceptual relations which characterize not only our language use but also our everyday life, thought and behaviour. However, many researchers think that the cognitive approach of metonymy is too general. In their opinion metonymic expressions are essentially elliptical structures, and they try to explain the phenomenon by studying the semantic structures of words, the syntactic structures of sentences, and pragmatic factors. For the present, results of psycholinguistic experiments which analyse how we comprehend metonymic expressions support both approaches. Accordingly, in the case of some metonymic types comprehension takes place through the activation of metonymic relations, while in other cases hearers (or readers) have to complement the elliptical linguistic structure. It seems that metonymy is a very complex phenomenon where besides the different metonymic types we have to consider various processing strategies.