Some reflections on metonymy and word-formation

Abstract

The present article is concerned with the question about the nature of the metonymic phenomena that can be observed in word-formation. We argue that, contra Janda (2011), very little metonymic takes place in word-formation per se, as part of grammar, and that metonymic phenomena that can be observed in relation to word-formation phenomena are actually lexical in nature, in the fairly strict sense of the term. Specifically, we demonstrate on a series of suffixations, compounds and reduplications that most of the time we either have metonymic shifts prior to word-formation, or metonymic shifts posterior to word-formation. In other words, metonymic shifts are either found in the input for word-formation, or operate on its output. Metonymy seems to operate simultaneously with a word-formation process only with what has been referred to as non-concatenative morphology.