Synedoche

3 Key excerpts on "Synedoche"

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  Tropical Truth(s)

  The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes

  • Armin Burkhardt, Brigitte Nerlich, Armin Burkhardt, Brigitte Nerlich(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In the following sections I would therefore like to chart the rises and falls of synecdoche in the ‘old rhetoric’, in historical semantics, in Jakobson’s work, in the ‘new rhetoric’ as developed in France, and finally in the frame-work of cognitive semantics, currently being developed. 1. The old rhetoric 3 Traditionally, synecdoche has been classified as one of the tropical figures of speech. Figures of speech themselves were split into two big groups: the tropes and other figures of speech such as construction, elocution and style. The number of tropes listed varies between thirty and two. Towards the end of what one can call the classical rhetorical tradition synecdoche is one figure amongst a minimalist group of four which was then further restricted to three and then two, namely metaphor and metonymy. The number of types of syn-ecdoche also varied during that time, as well as synecdoche’s inclusion within or exclusion form other adjacent tropes. Neither the term trope nor the term synecdoche were as yet used by Aris-totle, but in chapter 21 of his Poetics he distinguishes between four classes of ‘metaphors’, two types of which would later be included into the range of synecdoche: genus for species and species for genus. The Stoics developed the idea that there is a necessary relation between the poverty of languages and the need to make words shift from one meaning to another according to a certain number of logical or natural relations, relations that are also used in figurative speech (cf. Meyer 1993: 67). This idea would resurface at the be-ginning of the 19 th century and be of seminal importance to historical seman-tics, by then also influenced by associationist psychology. It would be redis-covered yet again by cognitive semanticists after a period when structural linguistics dominated the semantic scene.

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  Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition

  • Raphael Lyne(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Metaphor and synecdoche in cognition 33 dissimilarity in a way that metaphor does not. It does not neces- sarily make a difference, however, to the implied problem-solving effort that it derives from, and that it actually does. So while the group of tropes being fostered here (synecdoche, metonymy, meta- phor, metalepsis, and catachresis in particular) excludes simile, the characteristics of most of them (synecdoche excepted) will be seen in similes, which can be extended like metalepses, broken like cata- chreses, and so on. The next task of this chapter is to bring rhetoric and cognition into further contact, and it has a straightforward starting point by way of one of its two key tropes, synecdoche. For a literary critic reading about cognitive science, this particular rhetorical figure often proves surprisingly suggestive given its undervaluation in rhetoric and lit- erary criticism. Attempts to explain the workings of the brain make use of laboratory experiments on human subjects, evidence from neurology, conclusions drawn from computer modelling, and the scientists’ ability to create descriptive tools (for instance, analogies). In memory, for example, various processes require the connection of parts (fragmentary cues, where one part of something is offered to an experimental subject) and wholes (the remembered item that the cue elicits). Experiments are often complex and ingenious, but the part / whole dynamic is basic to how memory is seen to work by contemporary psychology. 4 In vision and visual recognition – and more generally in the study of the senses – parts and wholes are again at issue. Intuitively we know that our images of the world are some- times generated from fragments – misrecognitions, for example, result when wholes are generated incorrectly from suggestive parts.

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  Textual Metonymy

  A Semiotic Approach

  • A. Al-Sharafi(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In metonymy and synecdoche, one word or phrase stands in for a more straightforward ref- erence and this standing in is of a different nature from that which char- acterizes metaphor. The plugging in of an adjunct for the whole, or a more comprehensive term for a less, is essentially an oblique and less prosaic way of making a direct reference. Instances of metonymy and synecdoche point one directly to the absent item. It would be a failure in compre- hension if, on hearing the phrase ‘the White House said today’ one won- dered if shutters and doors opened like mouths. (Soskice 1985:57) Soskice concludes that ‘with metonymy and synecdoche, meaning is largely subsumed by the reference it makes’ (p. 58). The relation of reference believed to underlie the process of metonymy is quite important to the the- ory of metonymy as I am trying to develop it, particularly with reference to my interest in developing a textual model of metonymic relations in text. 3.4 Metonymic aspects of the linguistic sign This section is directly concerned with the explication of the metonymic basis of the linguistic sign. The main aim is to argue that metonymy under- lies a great deal of language use. The fact that we do not often recognise this does not mean that this influence does not exist. This is simply because metonymy is such an integral part of our cognition that most metonymies actually go unnoticed. Here, I am concerned with the semiotic dimension Metonymy and Semiotics 101 of metonymy and more particularly of metonymy as a feature of linguistic signs. 3.4.1 Metonymy as signification If signification, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter, is a process of naming two entities and then abstracting a relation of ‘standing for’ between them, then metonymy is this and something more.

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