Conceptual prominence and anaphora in English and French referential metonymy
Conceptual prominence and anaphora in English and French referential metonymy

Author(s): Issa Kanté
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: metonymy; anaphoric reference; cognition-utterance (CU) verbs; backgrounding; foregrounding
Summary/Abstract: This analysis examines the issues of anaphoric reference and conceptual prominence in work for author metonymy in English and French academic discourse. It argues that contrary to the apparent violation of the Domain Availability Principle, the matrix domain of this mapping is ultimately available for anaphoric reference through a syntagmatic and/or paradigmatic construal. The study also indicates that although the target meaning is not conceptually prominent in the construction, it does involve other significant pragmatic features, such as the speaker’s rhetorical intentions and the foregrounding of the source in order to defocus the target. Finally, it is argued that common cross-linguistic and language-specific strategies are employed to background the actual agent of the verb. From this perspective, in addition to metonymy, other constructions, that is, impersonal-passive and sentential relative, are frequently used by academic researchers to background authorial presence.

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