Discourse, Semantics and Metonymy

Resumen

In current research on discourse analysis and on metonymy there is an idea that is missing: the study of the discourse potential of metonymic activity. The reasons for this are to be found, in all likelihood, on the one hand, the still dominant idea that text coherence (also called text cohesion at the lexical level) does take place propositionally and on the other hand, on the also prevalent idea (tightly complementary to the first one) that metonymy is simply a local cognitive phenomenon, of a mainly referential nature. However, the evidence suggests, as will be extensively demonstrated in this paper, that metonymy is pervasive in much of our cognitive and discourse activities. Thus, metonymy may underlie the generation of conversational implicatures and the interpretation of indirect speech acts. It is through the cognitive approach and the application of frame semantics that we are in the position to offer a more plausible explanation of the discourse coherence phenomenon. After introducing the various approaches to semantics and justifying the convenience of a maximalist approach, I discuss the role of metaphor and above all the role of metonymy in discourse, as a pervading source of inferencing and coherence.