Metonymy
Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, sometimes results from relations of metonymy.
Greek and Latin scholars of rhetoric made significant contributions to the study of metonymy.
[13] Many cases of polysemy originate as metonyms: for example, "chicken" means the meat as well as the animal; "crown" for the object, as well as the institution.
[15][16] Metonymy works by the contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas the term "metaphor" is based upon their analogous similarity.
On the other hand, when Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that the Israeli language is a "phoenicuckoo cross with some magpie characteristics", he is using metaphors.
The reason the metaphors "phoenix" and "cuckoo" are used is that on the one hand hybridic "Israeli" is based on Hebrew, which, like a phoenix, rises from the ashes; and on the other hand, hybridic "Israeli" is based on Yiddish, which like a cuckoo, lays its egg in the nest of another bird, tricking it to believe that it is its own egg.
[20] Here are some broad kinds of relationships where metonymy is frequently used: A place is often used as a metonym for a government or other official institutions, for example, Brussels for the institutions of the European Union,[25][26] The Hague for the International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court, Nairobi for the government of Kenya, the Kremlin for the Russian presidency, Chausseestraße and Pullach for the German Federal Intelligence Service, Number 10, Downing Street or Whitehall for the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the UK civil service, the White House and Capitol Hill for the executive and legislative branches, respectively, of the United States federal government, Foggy Bottom for the U.S. State Department, Langley for the Central Intelligence Agency, Quantico for either the Federal Bureau of Investigation academy and forensic laboratory or the Marine Corps base of the same name, Zhongnanhai for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Malacañang for the President of the Philippines, their advisers and Office of the President, "La Moncloa" for the Prime Minister of Spain, and Vatican for the pope, Holy See and Roman Curia.
The High Street (of which there are over 5,000 in Britain) is a term commonly used to refer to the entire British retail sector.
[30] In recent Israeli usage, the term "Balfour" came to refer to the Israeli Prime Minister's residence, located on Balfour Street in Jerusalem, to all the streets around it where demonstrations frequently take place, and also to the Prime Minister and his family who live in the residence.
Al-Sharafi explains, "This is why they undermined practical and purely referential discourse because it was seen as banal and not containing anything new, strange or shocking.
"[32] Aristotle discussed different definitions of metaphor, regarding one type as what we know to be metonymy today.
"Perceived as such then metonymy will be a figure of speech in which there is a process of abstracting a relation of proximity between two words to the extent that one will be used in place of another.
"[32] Cicero viewed metonymy as more of a stylish rhetorical method and described it as being based on words, but motivated by style.
He explains: The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called 'realistic' trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of Romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both.
Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time.
In the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoy's artistic attention is focused on the heroine's handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" or "bare shoulders" are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong.
