metonymy: one construct, many systems

In rhetoric, metonymy is the trope of referring to something by the name of something closely associated with it rather than by its own name, as in "the crown" for the monarchy or "the White House" for the presidency. Quintilian's The Orator's Education treats it as metonymia among the tropes, and Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms gives the standard definition, distinguishing it from metaphor, which works by resemblance rather than by association. The referent is a substitution based on real contiguity between the thing meant and the thing named.[1][2]

Unit

A substitution of an associated term for the thing meant

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by a name-for-name substitution grounded in contiguity rather than similarity

In cognitive linguistics, metonymy is treated not merely as a figure of speech but as a conceptual process in which one entity stands for another within the same experiential domain, such as part for whole or producer for product, structuring ordinary thought and not just ornamental language. Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By argues that such mappings are pervasive in everyday reasoning and reference. It is recognisably the same contiguity-based construct the rhetoricians named, now reframed as a mechanism of cognition rather than a device of style, which is why this counts as one construct recurring across two systems rather than a coincidence of names.[3]

Unit

A conceptual mapping in which one entity stands for an associated entity in the same domain

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through systematic patterns in everyday language and inference that reveal the underlying stands-for mapping