Sandra L. Halverson

Domains and Dimensions in Metonymy: A Corpus-Based Study of Schengen and Maastricht

This study adopts a prototype account of metonymy in an investigation of the placenames Schengen and Maastricht in Norwegian newspaper corpora. The model is used to hypothesize about metonymic development, indeterminacy, and chaining, and it is suggested that diachronic development, indeterminacy, and chaining follow given directional pathways along the dimensional continua. In these data, the 2 place names show converse distributions of literal and metonymic uses, and Schengen develops a range of different metonymic uses. These patterns are linked to extralinguistic political events and specific directions of category extension. Indeterminacy and chaining are also demonstrated in ways that lend support to the hypotheses presented. In including both domains and dimensions, the prototype account gives considerable leverage with regard to indeterminacy and chaining, and is also well-suited to the particular challenges posed by the Norwegian noun compounds included here.