Metonymic Motivation of the CONDUIT Metaphor

Résumé

The aim of this paper is to study the metonymic motivation of the conduit metaphor. Following the radical hypothesis presented by Barcelona (2003) – that every metaphor is motivated by conceptual metonymy −, the metonymic structure of the target domain communication is analyzed. Two metonymies are identified as conceptual prerequisites for the metaphorical mapping communication is sending ideas, described in this paper as the basic metaphor of the idealized cognitive model that has been named conduit metaphor. Another related metonymical mapping is analyzed in order to show the difference between metonymic motivation and simple metonymic coherence. A hypothesis is presented according to which the metonymic motivation of the communication is sending ideas metaphor corresponds to the second type posited by Barcelona (2003) and the basic structure of the complex idealized model of communication named conduit is described.