PLACE for ACTOR Structures: Event Agent Construction and Communicative Effects
Résumé
Forty years ago, R. Jakobson (1963: 66) underlined the deep affinity that exists
between realism and metonymy. Metonymy leaves the rhetoric domain and serves to build the
world and its events and to facilitate access to information. Metonymy becomes “a way to see
the world”. Later on, cognitive linguistics developed the A stands for B model (G. Lakoff &
M. Johnson, 1985), according to which metonymy is a matter of words and conceptualization
that permits to switch reference from one to another, by virtue of an Idealized Cognitive
Model (ICM) and background cultural conditions. A PLACE stands for an INSTITUTION,
CONTAINER for CONTAINED, CONTROLLER for CONTROLLED, PART for the
WHOLE and vice-versa. The notion of natural metonymy is forged.
Natural metonymies are spontaneous in many discursive places like everyday
communication, news, specialized discourse, etc. Statements like Les Etats-Unis ont frappé
l’Afghanistan, L’Uruguay laisse flotter son peso, etc. are very common in news discourse3.
All of them may be interpreted in terms of A stands for B structures (infra). Is this a simple
denominative tool or is it ideology? Is it simplification or reference complexity? The
Idealized Model has no answer to these questions.
What I aim to do in this paper is precisely to offer an account of metonymy as being
halfway between lexical cognitive tool and a newspaper device. It is an attempt to describe a
conceptual model in discourse, and thus to bring discursive supports to the functioning of the
country-name based metonymy.