Entre os domínios da metáfora e da metonímia: um estudo de processos de recategorização

Abstract

The object of this study is recategorization in the referentiation process. From the proposed analyses, we argue for a broader notion of this phemenon, which may or may not reveal itself in referential expressions and yet be concentrated on these. Apothéloz and Reichler-Béguelin (1995), the pioneers in the investigations concentrated on this theme to the extent of Textual Linguistics, whose approach was restricted to lexical recategorizations in a textual-discoursive perspective. On the assumption of cognitive-referential nature of recategorization, we postulate, initially, the need for an interface between the Textual Linguistics and the Cognitive Linguistics to account for the complexity and dynamics of this process, in descriptive and explanatory terms. We focus on recategorizations treatment licensed by metaphors and metonymy, raising two linked hypotheses: the first dealing with the existence of a sort of recategorization through interaction among metonymy-metaphor, and the second addressing the recategorizations licensed by metaphors and metonymy in the context of a continuum. For the construction of the postulated interface, we used the Theory Of Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff, 1987, and collaborators). The basic assumption of this theory is that knowledge is organized through structures called Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs), and that the structure of categories and the effects are prototypical products of that organization. To this fundamentation we associated the cognitive studies that suggest that the treatment of metaphor and metonymy is an interactive processes (GOOSSENS, 2003, BARCELONA, 2003), with opening for the design of these cognitive processes from the perspective of a continuum (RADDEN, 2003). Furthermore, we analyzed occurrences of recategorization instantiated by metaphors and metonymy in a corpus consisting of four poems belonging to four authors from the Brazilian literature on the subject of death. The methodological steps of applying the model of the theory of Idealized Cognitive Models follows partially the proposed analysis model developed and applied in Feltes (2007), but we added to the model of the author the ICMs propositional-type frame, by which we evoked the description of the metaphorical and metonymy ICMs and, consequently, the description of the ICMs image schemes. The results point to the validation of the assumptions made, allowing a redefinition of the recategorization approach, until then only based on the theoretical Textual Linguistics apparatus, so that the interface with the Cognitive Linguistics brings significant contributions to the treatment of this complex linguistic phenomenon, once it allows the scope of the cognitive processes that underlie them. It is exactly the understanding of processes that extends the potential explanatory in the resizing of recategorization.