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Part of
Studies in Figurative Thought and Language
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou
[Human Cognitive Processing 56] 2017
► pp. 76–104

Chapter 3
How to do things with metonymy in discourse

| University of Pavia
This chapter addresses the role of figurative thought at the level of discourse and investigates the metonymic grounding of interpersonal communication. With the focus placed upon illocutionary constructions realized through the interrogative sentence type, it aims to delineate the way in which conceptual metonymy contributes to moulding indirect illocutions. The research is conducted under the umbrella of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, which conceives of illocutions as entrenched, productive and replicable form-function pairings. The qualitative analysis of attested corpus data retrieved from the bnc, the coca, and the WebCorp provides a depiction of the variety and complexity of some constructional procedures along with the socio-cultural variables licensing them, and it prompts the proposal of a Thinking-for-Metonymic-Speaking (TFMS) process that motivates illocutionary indirectness.
Keywords: illocutionary constructions, interrogative sentence type, indirect illocutions, Thinking-for-Metonymic-Speaking (TFMS) process
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Illocution and conceptual metonymy
  • 3.The Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model
  • 4.Interrogative sentence type and illocutionary constructions
    • 4.1Can You X?
    • 4.2Could You X?
    • 4.3Can’t You X?
    • 4.4Couldn’t You X?
    • 4.5Can I X?
    • 4.6Could I X?
    • 4.7May I X?
    • 4.8Might I X?
    • 4.9Will You X?
    • 4.10Won’t You X?
    • 4.11Would You X?
    • 4.12Will You Let Me X?
    • 4.13Would You Like X?
    • 4.14Wouldn’t You Like X?
    • 4.15Would you Like Me to X?
  • 5.The Thinking-for-Metonymic-Speaking process
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.56.03bai
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