Introduction: why should applied linguists care about metaphor and metonymy in social practices?

Abstract

Metaphor and metonymy are ubiquitous in language and thought (LAKOFF AND JOHNSON, 1980; 2003). These figurative schemes are present in our actions, our conversations in different settings, when we read a newspaper, watch a TV advertisement, or listen to a political debate. In this Special Issue on Metaphor and Metonymy in Social Practices, we present new scholarly studies that have examined why and how people employ metaphors and metonymies in different social contexts. The study of metaphor and metonymy has a long history within linguistics, philosophy, and literature. Classic rhetoricians sought to define how different figures of speech, or tropes, convey specific types of meanings in discourse, mostly within poetic and literary language. Metaphor, for example, has been traditionally defined as a comparison between two dissimilar objects or ideas, as when Romeo comments that “Juliet is the sun” in Shakespeare’s famous play. In this manner, metaphor highlights the similarity which emerges when two different domains of experience are highlighted. Metonymy, on the other hand, focuses on the part-whole relationship within a single knowledge domain and is fundamentally based on contiguity. When the 19th-centurry English playwright Edward Bulwer- Lytton wrote “The pen is mightier than the sword” in his historical play “Cardinal Richelieu”, he mentioned “pen” to refer to the people who use pens, namely authors, while “sword” refers to the people most associated with the use of this weapon, namely soldiers. By giving specific, concrete references to the objects employed by particular people, Bulwer-Lytton gave a more vivid, dramatic expression of his thought than if he had simply stated “Authors are more important than soldiers.”[...]