Metonymie als Phänomen der Semantik-Pragmatik-Schnittstelle

Abstract

Metonymy is described as a phenomenon at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Eventually, it is motivated in terms of pragmatics, because it allows speakers to comply simultaneously to potentially conflicting requests from Grice’s conversation maxims (viz., brevity and clarity). This perspective on metonymy opens new insights into the phenomenon. First, I will show that in this way one can delimit the contribution of metonymy itself to the meaning of a metonymic utterance, which cannot be done in a purely semantic analysis of metonymy. Then I will discuss the influence of metonymy on textual coherence.