METONYMY TO METAPHOR: THE PARADOX OF COGNITIVE METAPHORS

The article covers several theoretical issues related to epidigmatics (specifically, the typology of the derived meaning of the word) and the typology of cognitive metaphors. The emphasis is on the use of existing lexical units, which Aristotle called names with «transferred» meaning and which are one of the most important subjects of neology. It seems also very important to concentrate on the hermeneutic aspect of transferred metaphorical uses of the word in a poetical text, the goal of which is to discover their motivational base. The cognitive metaphor, complicated by the underlying metonymy, is a trope which is most difficult to understand; it is structured as a metaphor-riddle. On the material of the poetic texts the interpretation of «transfers» which are not obvious for understanding is offered. Special attention is paid to abstract substantives, for which cognitive metaphor is a natural form of existence in speech associated with verbalization of the invisible world and creating its attributive vocabulary. R. Jakobson’s interpretation of metaphor as «parallelism elliptically reduced to a point», refers not to any metaphor, but only to the cognitive metaphor complicated with metonymy — to the «metonymic metaphor». The article proposes an understanding of the mechanism of metaphorization of metonymy: the whole is called by its part, but the part is not a piece of clothing, but a hypostatized parameter overgrown with its secondary predicates, which is demonstrated by examples from literary texts and by the translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66.