Metonymy in Frames: The Role of Functional Relations in Contiguity-Based Semantic Shifts of Nouns

This work refines the notion of metonymy and the underlying notion of conceptual contiguity by describing a fundamental structural property of metonymy.

Studied since antiquity, metonymy is a ubiquitous mechanism of meaning construction in context that involves a linguistically coded source concept that directs attention to a situationally relevant target concept. Modelling metonymic contiguity by means of recursive attribute-value structures, inspired by findings from cognitive psychology...