“Is this road lazy or just incompetent?” Conceptual proximity as a parameter of salience in metonymies

Conceptual metonymy is often defined as a way of referring to one entity (the target) by means of another entity (the vehicle) (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36) or as a shift in profile, so that one aspect of a construal is highlighted instead of another (e.g. Langacker 2008: 69). Both of these approaches acknowledge that metonymy involves entities which “are somehow associated” and that this association is salient for the conceptualizer (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 17), but the nature of this salience is rarely discussed. This article attempts to account for and parametrize salience in terms of conceptual proximity within a cognitive domain. The key postulate is that usually the most salient concept is the one which is the closest to the target concept within a network of contiguity relations defined relative to a cognitive domain. The default cognitive domain for selecting the vehicle is the domain of observables or direct physical interaction, but the choice of the domain is highly context-dependent.