Metonymy as an embodied resource in English as a lingua franca interaction

Metonymy is a cognitive operation, a predominantly inferential process, and more fundamental than metaphor (Denroche 2015). Over the past two decades, research has increasingly focused on the multimodality of human interaction, revealing that gestures are intrinsically abstract and partial representations and therefore often metonymic in nature (Mittelberg 2019; Mittelberg & Hinnell 2024). Nevertheless, both in cognitive linguistics and in gesture studies, metaphor has thus far received considerably more attention than metonymy. Given the well-established pervasiveness of metonymy in everyday communication among native speakers, this study investigates how non-native speakers collaboratively elaborate verbal–gestural metonymies on a turn-by-turn basis in English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions, and examines the specific functions these metonymies serve. Based on a fine-grained analysis of three filmed and transcribed sequences selected from the ICMI corpus, we examine the way participants rely on metonymies when breaking down complex frames into more basic-level schemas that can function as building blocks. This raises important questions as to whether speakers use metonymies to cope with lexical gaps and to construct their conversations on the basis of a situationally co-constructed common ground, as Kecskes (2014, 2015) has pointed out for ELF interactions at the verbal level.