Metonymy

Metonymia ^[1] ( other Greek: μετονυμία “renaming”, from μετά- “over” + ὄνομα / ὄνυμα “name”) - a type of trail , a phrase in which one word is replaced by another, denoting an object (phenomenon) located in one or another (spatial, temporal, etc.) connection with the subject, which is indicated by the replaced word. The substitute word is used in a figurative sense.

Metonymy should be distinguished from the metaphor with which it is often confused: metonymy is based on the replacement of the words “adjacency” (a part instead of a whole or vice versa, a representative of a class instead of the whole class or vice versa, a container instead of content or vice versa, etc.), and a metaphor - “by similarity” ^[2] . A special case of metonymy is the synecdoch ^[2] .

For example, the phrase “All flags will be with us ...” from the introduction to the poem “The Bronze Horseman ” (1834) by A. S. Pushkin, where “flags” mean “countries” (part replaces the whole, lat. Pars pro toto ). The meaning of metonymy is that it distinguishes a property in a phenomenon that, by its nature, can replace the others. Thus, metonymy essentially differs from a metaphor, on the one hand, by a greater real interconnection of substitute members, and on the other, by more restrictiveness, the elimination of those features that are not immediately noticeable in this phenomenon. Like a metaphor, metonymy is inherent in the language in general (cf., for example, the word "posting", the meaning of which is metonymically distributed from the action on its result), but it has a special meaning in the literary work.

In the early Soviet literature, the attempt to maximize the use of metonymy both theoretically and practically was given by constructivists who advanced the principle of so-called “locality” (motivation of verbal means with the theme of the work, that is, limitation by their real dependence on the topic). However, this attempt was not sufficiently substantiated, since the nomination of metonymy to the detriment of the metaphor is illegal: these are two different ways of establishing a connection between phenomena, not mutually exclusive, but complementing each other.