

Some uses of figurative language may be understood as both metonymy and metaphor for example, the relationship between "a crown" and a "king" could be interpreted metaphorically (i.e., the king, like his gold crown, could be seemingly stiff yet ultimately malleable, over-ornate, and consistently immobile). There is nothing press-like about reporters or crown-like about a monarch, but "the press" and "the crown" are both common metonyms. When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with metaphor. Metonymy works by the contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas the term "metaphor" is based upon their analogous similarity. Many cases of polysemy originate as metonyms: for example "chicken" meaning the meat as well as the animal "crown" for the object, as well as the institution.
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The figure of speech is a "metonymy of a metonymy".
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For example, "lead foot" may describe a fast driver lead is heavy, and a heavy foot on the accelerator causes a vehicle to go fast. Metalepsis uses a familiar word or a phrase in a new context. Synecdoche uses a part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to the part. Greek and Latin scholars of rhetoric made significant contributions to the study of metonymy. In addition to its use in everyday speech, metonymy is a figure of speech in some poetry and in much rhetoric. Whereas Roman Jakobson argued that the fundamental dichotomy in trope was between metaphor and metonymy, Burke argues that the fundamental dichotomy is between irony and synecdoche, which he also describes as the dichotomy between dialectic and representation, or again between reduction and perspective. He discusses them in particular ways in his book A Grammar of Motives.

Īmerican literary theorist Kenneth Burke considers metonymy as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. The words metonymy and metonym come from the Greek μετωνυμία, metōnymía, "a change of name", from μετά, metá, "after, post, beyond", and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνυμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, "name".
