2015-09-06
273
Words are constantly changing their meaning. Dictionaries are a good illustration of that. For example, the latest edition of Webster’s dictionary included some 10,000 new words along with 100,000 new meanings to words already existing and some 225,000 revised definitions.
A closer analysis of a relationship between different meanings of the same word will reveal that they can be in metaphoric relations or relations of metonymy (metaphoric relations are relations of similarity while metonymic relations are those of contiguity).
The term metaphor refers to a situation where a word appears to have both a ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ or ‘transferred’ meaning. The words for parts of the body provide the best illustration of metaphor. For example, we speak of the hands and face of a clock, the foot of a bed or a mountain, the leg of a chair or table, the tongue of a shoe, the eye of a needle, etc.
Some other examples of metaphoric relations between different meanings are to milk,
a mole, to digest, to play it by ear, to play footsie.
On the other hand, metonymy refers to the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity and underlies a very common process of human cognition: it is common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it. Here is an illustration of metonymic relations within one entry, which reveal different aspects of the same frame:
- The New York Times is most interesting on Sundays.
- The New York Times employs hundreds of writers.
- I found 4 mistakes in The New York Times this week.
