Metonymy has long been studied by semanticists and other fields, but recent years have seen it garner attention in the field of word-formation and particularly the concept of conversion. This paper examines metonymy as an instrument in conversion (wor...
Metonymy has long been studied by semanticists and other fields, but recent years have seen it garner attention in the field of word-formation and particularly the concept of conversion. This paper examines metonymy as an instrument in conversion (words having more than one syntactic form such as noun and verb) as well as polysemy (words having more than one related sense) to show that the two processes are essentially the same, differing only in where they draw novelty from: a word’s semantic properties or its syntactic properties. The two are examined separately and then in tandem, yielding a two-axis model in which metonymy operates on words. Practical implications of the model are then discussed.