Review of Goatly (2024): Metaphor, Metonymy and Lexicogenesis

OverviewThis book consists of ten chapters.The first four address metaphor and metonymy, laying a solid foundation for later chapters on lexicalization.The book proposes three arguments: (i) derived items are more likely figurative than their bases (Chaps.5-6); (ii) derivation tends to conceal the figurative source through different processing routes (Chaps.7-8); (iii) lexicalization is filtered by relevance to culture in terms of discourse and action genres in a community (Chaps.9-10).Chapter 1 addresses key issues in metaphor and reassesses CMT.It refines metaphor as a text unit marked by unconventional reference, modification, or assignment arising from similarity or analogy.The rigorous definition separates metaphorical and literal categorization.Metaphoricity varies along approximation, contradictoriness, explicitness and marking, and conventionality.The author illustrates the approximation cline with elaborative metaphors and develops a fine-grained taxonomy of metaphors according to semantic distance, where 'The new moon was a banana' (p.29) serves as a prototypical transfer metaphor of intermediate semantic distance.The contradictoriness cline measures the degree of paradox, reaching its peak in syntactic contradictions such as 'The child is father of the man' (p.31).Explicitness reduces metaphoricity, such as similes like 'run...like squirrels' (p.33).On the conventionality cline, highly lexicalized metaphors like brazen (p.35) require minimal processing and are crucial to lexicogenesis.The chapter then revisits Lakoff 's experientialist theory by criticizing its prior universalist stance with cross-cultural evidence on bodily experience, metaphorical lexis, emotion, cognitive schemata, and ideological functions.It ends with an introduction to the online Thesaurus of Metaphor and invites empirical verification.Chapter 2 explains the essentials of metonymy with a focus on its contiguity cline and conventionalization.Metonymy, like metaphor, is defined by its unconventional nature of contiguity followed by various examples.Criticizing Peirsma and Geeraerts's (2006) prototype account of contiguity for the overlap and discontinuity problem of metaphor, the author develops an alternative contiguity cline in terms of frame-schemas.The closer the elements in an action schema, the more conventional and predictable the metonymy.For instance, a highly contiguous metonymy within an action schema involves PART AS WHOLE such as America for the USA (p.51).As such, zone activation at the conventional pole is excluded.Highly conventional metonymies, like their metaphorical counterparts, require minimal pragmatic inference and evolve into the lexicon, such as hands for people working (p.51).Two tables, adapted from Kövecses and Radden (1998) and Littlemore (2015), sort common metonymy themes by frame-schema types.Metonymy themes are interpreted with Halliday and Matthiessen's (2004) tran-