Embodied, social, and creative dimensions of metonymy

Abstract Metonymy has traditionally been studied as a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon closely linked to metaphor. Nevertheless, the connection between metaphor and metonymy requires further exploration. This special issue examines the embodied, social, and creative dimensions of metonymy, emphasizing its role in authentic language use and multimodal contexts. The contributions provide different scholarly and empirical perspectives drawing on naturalistic data from diverse genres and modalities, including spoken interaction, fiction, advertising, and corpus data. By focusing on metonymy and how it is used across different types of naturalistic data, we aim to facilitate a discussion about the various dimensions relevant to comprehending the full complexity of metonymy and its relationship to metaphor. Together, these articles demonstrate that metonymy is not merely a referential tool, but rather a flexible, embodied, and socially grounded mechanism for meaning making across various contexts, providing shortcuts to shared encyclopedic knowledge and social meaning, and as such deserving more attention in studies of figurative language.