Is metonymy really more regular than metaphor? A first investigation into the French Lexicon

Regular polysemy is considered more intrinsically linked to metonymy than to metaphor in both linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. Yet, on the one hand, metonymy exhibits varying degrees of regularity, and on the other hand, metaphor is also subject to polysemic regularity. This paper aims to assess the extent to which metonymy and metaphor exhibit regularity in the lexicon. Based on the analysis of lexicographic descriptions of a sample of nearly 3,000 French nouns, this study compares the regularity of polysemy patterns—defined as recurring sense alternations—within the two types of figures. While the findings confirm theoretical assumptions by identifying more regular metonymic patterns than regular metaphoric ones, they reveal, on average, no significant difference between metonymy and metaphor in terms of regularity. The resulting dataset is publicly available to allow further exploration of how regular polysemy emerges in the lexicon and its correlation with lexical figures.