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<Paper uid="W03-1401">
  <Title>Metonymy as a Cross-lingual Phenomenon</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Viewed traditionally, metonymy is a non-literal figure of speech in which the name of one thing is substituted for that of another related to it. It has been described as a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity (Radden 1999). In its basic form, it establishes a semantic relation between two concepts that are associated with word forms. The semantic shift expressed by the relation may or may not be accompanied by a shift in form. The semantic relation that is captured by metonymy is one of semantic contiguity, in the sense that in many cases there are systematic relations between metonymically related concepts that can be regarded as slots in conceptual frames (cf. Fillmore 1977).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For example, in the sentence 'The colonies revolted against the crown.' crown is used as a symbol for the monarchy as well as denoting the traditional head ornament worn by the monarch. As the example above shows, polysemy is a common way in which metonymically related concepts manifest themselves in language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It is to be expected that any systematic semantic relations between concepts expressed by these sense distinctions are lexicalized, i.e. they are explicitly listed in dictionaries and independent of a pragmatic situation. For example, university is on the one hand an institution and on the other a building. The semantic relation between the two senses is 'is housed in'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Regular polysemy is a subset of metonymy that covers the systematicity of the semantic relations involved. It can be defined as a subset of metonymically related senses of the same word displaying a conventional as opposed to novel type of semantic contiguity relation. This relation holds for related senses of two or more words (Apresjan, 1973), i.e. is a lexicalized pattern, not a nonce formation (a pragmatically defined novel metonymy), and can therefore be called regular. It is this subtype of metonymy that we concentrate on in this paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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