Metonymy

Together with metaphor and synecdoche, metonymy is the most familiar of the ancient figures of rhetoric originating in Greek antiquity, and later included in the more comprehensive taxonomies elaborated in French 17th and 18th century treatises. In the complex classifications of the latter works, metonymy, like the two other figures, is a trope (applying to words, or single signs, rather than to sentences, or sign complexes) and a substitution (involving the exchange of one elements for another, rather than the suppression or addition of an element, or the permutation of the order of several elements). What differentiates metonymy from metaphor and synecdoche is the nature of the relationship between the two elements entering into the substitutions. Whereas the tenor and its vehicle are joined by similarity in metaphor, metonymy connects them by means of a contiguity, and they are related as part to whole in the synecdoche.

In semiotics, however, these figures are interesting for the relationship they seem to entertain to more basic theoretical concepts, such as the distinction between syntagm and paradigm, and the notion of indexicality, and for the part they have played in the renewal of rhetoric inside semiotics.

The two most basic relationships of verbal language recognised by Saussure, the paradigmatic (or "associative") relations, and the syntagmatic relations, also known as the axes of substitution and selection, were identified by Jakobson (1942) with metaphor and metonymy, respectively, assimilating the synecdoche to the latter. Not only did Jakobson apply these terms to non-verbal discourses, claiming that metaphor characterized lyrical poetry, Romanticism, Chaplin’s films, and the Freudian dream symbols, while metonymy was embodied in Epic poetry, realististic novels, Griffith’s films, and the Freudian dream projections; but he also distinguished two kinds of aphasia, according as they resulted from an impairment of metaphoric or metonymic aspects of the language capacity. Jakobson’s identification of substitution, paradigm, and metaphor, on the one hand, and of combination, syntagm, and metonymy, on the other, has inspired many followers, the most famous of which is the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

The idea of narrative prose and film being essentially metonymic has encountered a large following, among literary scholars, and film semioticians, respectively. The classical Hollywood clichés are often described as metonymic (e.g. the falling calendar pages, the driving wheels of the railroad engine) or synecdochic (e.g. close shots of marching feet to represent an army). Ever since Barthes, in his famous Panzani analysis, described the tomato as a metonymy for Italy, students of advertisements have claimed to discover numerous visual incarnations of this figure in their domain. In most advertisements, the contiguity, e.g. between a crown and a bottle of gin, is not referred to as something known, as in Barthes’ example, but is created in the picture, and yet such instances, too, have often been termed metonymies.

Jakobson’s analogy is problematic on several counts. First, and least seriously, it reposes on an identification of metonymy and synecdoche. This amalgamation has sometimes been justified by saying that it may be difficult to tell the two figures apart: for example, the crown will be considered a metonymy for the king, if the latter is considered to be a physical person, with whom the crown is in spatial contiguity, but a synecdoche for the king, if royalty is seen to be primarily an office, of which the crown may be considered a significant part. But this really shows that the functions, in the two cases, are distinct: it is the object which is ambiguously defined (Sonesson 1989,I.2.).

By identifying the two figures, however, Jakobson rightly highlights what they have in common: they are both founded on what we, following Peirce, will call indexical grounds. There are, however, two principles of relevance defining indexicality: contiguity, and the relation between a whole and its parts, which could be called factorality. According to Groupe µ (1970: 97ff), objects may be decomposed in two ways: materially (a tree divided into stem, branches, leaves, etc.) and conceptually (the same tree replaced in the hierarchy from living things to cork-oaks). This distinction is identified with the one in logic between extension and intension, and the former is also referred to as a perceptual division. In fact, however, this ignores the real perceptual decomposition, which depends on the position of the subject, which is fundamental in all visual semiosis, i.e. the division into perspectives. Factorality must therefore be of three kinds: proper parts, properties, and perspectives (Sonesson 1989,I.2.4.).

In the second place, to equate syntagm and paradigm with metonymy and metaphor, respectively, is to confuse relationships inside sign systems with relationships between particular sign tokens, or secondary relationships between signs. Indeed, metonymies, like metaphors, are either created in a particular given text, or they are stock images, which relates signs, or at least sign contents, in stable relations.

It has been pointed out that the similarity present in a paradigm is often simply the position in the syntagm, whereas some more pregnant similarity relation in required in the case of metaphors. At least, both types of similarity are relations in absentia. However, the contiguity of syntagms is a relation in praesentia, whereas that of metonymies, like all true figures, is a relation in absentia.

True metonymies (as well as true synecdoches) really are secondary indexical signs: they relate two pre-existing signs by means of their respective contents, which means that a sign present in the syntagmatic chain serves to invoke another sign which is absent from it. A more common case, however, which is often what is meant, is when no particular absent expression plane is brought to mind, but only a secondary content is implied by the content plane of the sign which is present: here we have what we, by analogy, could call "dead metonymies" like the cross for Christ and the sword for the army, or "dead synecdoches", like the sail for the ship and the clock for the watchmaker’s (both as words and as visual signs).

Barthes’ tomato standing for Italy is probably, to a Frenchman (both not, for instance, to a Mexican) a metonymy, or perhaps better a synecdoche, in the latter sense. Most so-called metonymies found in publicity, however, actually correspond to the inversion of the true metonymy, two signs connected by means of their respective expressions (the crown beside the gin bottle, the naked girl in the car). This would not ordinarily be called a metonymy, but it better corresponds to the Jakobsonean analogy with the syntagmatic relationships, since both items connected are in praesentia (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.2.).

In the original design for the project of a general rhetoric by Groupe µ (1970), metonymy had a part to play. The synecdoche (which to Jakobson is already a metonymy) may go from the whole to the part, i.e. the general to the particular, or the reverse: thus, we get generalizing and particularizing synecdoches. According to this scheme, combinations of synecdoches give rise to two kinds of metaphors, and two kinds of metonymies, the other combinations being impossible: a generalizing conceptual synecdoche, followed by a particularizing one, is a metaphor (flexible connecting girl and birch); and a particularizing material synecdoche followed by a generalizing one (the French word "voile" connecting a boat and a widow) is also a metaphor. However, a generalizing material synecdoche followed by a particularizing one (Caesar standing for "De Bello Gallico" as different parts of Caesar’s life) is a metonymy, and so is the combination of conceptual particularizing and generalizing synecdoches (no example given).

It is not surprising that, when later turning to visual rhetoric, Groupe µ (1992) abandons this system. Now, instead, figures are cross-classified as being in absentia or in praesentia, and conjoint or disjoint. The figure is in absentia conjoint, if the two units occupy the same place in the statement, one being totally substituted for the other (the bottles taking the place of the pupils in Haddock’s eyes). It is in praesentia conjoint, to the extent that the units appear in the same place, with only partial substitution of one for the other (a figure which is partially coffee pot and partially cat).

There will be a figure which is in praesentia disjoint, if the two entities occupy different places, without any substitution taking place (the same geometrical form for a roof and a road in perspective). Finally, the figure will be in absentia disjoint, when only one unit is manifested, while the other is exterior to the statement, but is projected onto it (a title contradicting what is shown in the picture). In fact, the first two cases are involved with factorality, and the second two with contiguity.

But it is easy to see that there are more cases than the system of classification allows for: different degrees of integration of the part into the whole (feature or proper part of an object, coalescence of different objects, objets in a set, object in its proper environment, etc.) and different degrees of unexpectedness of the combination (pure alterity, contrariness, cultural and anthropological universals, and logical contradictions). The rhetoric of what is often confounded in the single term metonymy may turn out to be even more complex than suggested by Groupe µ’s latest contribution (cf. Sonesson 1995; 1996).

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