MDDM Ch. 51 Metonymy

[Dave Monroe]

"He has blundered into a Remark about Hats, cock's and
not.
   "'Sir?' Dixon giving Beef.
   "'Surely, Sir, I meant no disrespect to the
Quakers, among whom I number,-- '
   "''Tis the dismissive Use of Metonymy, Sir.'" (M&D,
Ch. 51, p. 492)

Main Entry: me·ton·y·my
Pronunciation: m&-'tä-n&-mE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -mies
Etymology: Latin metonymia, from Greek metOnymia, from
meta- + -Onymon -onym
Date: 1547
: a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name
of one thing for that of another of which it is an
attribute or with which it is associated (as "crown"
in "lands belonging to the crown")
- met·o·nym·ic /"me-t&-'ni-mik/ or met·o·nym·i·cal
/-mi-k&l/ adjective

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/netdict?metonymy

And see as well ...

http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-syn1.htm

"Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is usually credited
with being the first to identify metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche and irony as the four basic tropes (to
which all others are reducible), although this
distinction can be seen as having its roots in the
Rhetorica of Peter Ramus (1515-1572) (Vico 1968,
129-131). This reduction was popularized in the
twentieth century by the American rhetorician Kenneth
Burke (1897-1993), who referred to the four 'master
tropes' (Burke 1969, 503-17). Each of these four
tropes represents a different relationship between the
signifier and the signified; Hayden White suggests
that these relationships consist of: resemblance
(metaphor), adjacency (metonymy), essentiality
(synecdoche) and 'doubling' (irony) (White 1979,
97)....

[...]

"Hayden White has suggested a tropological sequence in
Western discourse (originally based on historical
writing), whereby the dominant trope changed from one
period to the next - from metaphor to metonymy to
synecdoche to irony (White 1973). He interprets Vico
as the originator of this particular sequence,
although Vico's hypothetical historical sequence for
the development of the four key tropes seems to be
open to the interpretation that it was from metonymy
to synecdoche to metaphor to irony (White 1978, 5ff,
197ff; Vico 1968, 129-31)....

[...]

"Michel Foucault undertook an 'archeological' study of
three loosely defined historical periods: the
'Renaissance' period, the 'Classical' period and the
'Modern' period. He argued that each period had an
underlying epistemology. White suggests that each of
these periods, together with the Postmodern period in
which Foucault wrote, reflects one of the four master
tropes in White's suggested sequence (White 1978,
230-60). Elsewhere he argues that in Foucault, 'every
"discursive formation" undergoes a finite number of
... shifts before reaching the limits of the épistème
that sanctions its operations. This number corresponds
to the fundamental modes of figuration identified by
the theory of tropology: metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche and irony (which is here understood as
self-conscious catechresis)' (White 1979, 95).
Cathachresis is variously defined, but it is based on
the notion of an abusive comparison. 

"Foucault himself speculated about a sequence of
tropes, although this is not the same sequence as that
proposed by White. He related this to the development
of writing and language in a three-part sequence from
synecdoche to metonymy to catachresis or metaphor...."

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem07.html

Foucault, Michel.  The Order of Things:
   An Archaeoloigy of the Human Sciences.
   New York: Pantheon, 1970 [1966]. 

Vico, Gianbattista.  The New Science.
   Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Finch.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968 [1744]. 

White, Hayden.  Metahistory: The Historical
   Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

__________.  "Michel Foucault."  Structuralism
   and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1979.  81-115

__________.  The Content of the Form: Narrative
   Discourse and Historical Representation.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 

Mason and Dixon are, of course, of Foucault's
metonymic "Classical" period (Mason & Dixon being of
the ironic "Postmodern" then?) ...

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