Centre for Languages, Culture and Communications

We know from Aristotle that metaphor is a cognitive process that enables a rich and rapid understanding of new ideas. Its cognitive partner metonymy, however, has received significantly less attention.
This research addresses two fundamental elements of metonymy in thought: firstly its definition, and secondly its function in creativity. It is a first foray into non-verbal metonymic creative thought, taken from an art practice perspective. This viewpoint offers access to how metonymy functions in material processes, and how it draws meaning from proximal contexts. With reference to cognitive linguistics, art philosophy and complexity theory, it uses case-study analysis and art practice to consider where and how meaning is held within processes, materials, objects, language and context, and the relationship between metonymy, metaphor, literality, salience and novelty. It suggests a new, pragmatic definition of metonymy for use in non-verbal communication analysis, including visual art, sound art and music. It finds that metonymy is a highly dynamic domain-internal process of meaning expansion, which uses proximity and adjacency to draw in meaning.
In art practice, this research has identified four of an unknown number of types of proximal relations: co-present relations, whereby a set or grouping of related elements are displayed together; elements that have a presence-absence dynamic using PART-FOR-WHOLE relations; artworks with an ambiguous context that shifts between perceptions and expectations, and perceptual illusion, whereby sounds or images are generated in the mind of the beholder, through idiosyncrasies of our human perceptual system. It provides the basis from which artists can theorise about their practice, and art historians can review works through the lens of metonymy. Cognitive linguistics can draw on these visual art references to further inform debates on creativity and cognition. In time, metonymy theory may be integrated into the teaching of art theory and of discourse in a wider sense across the humanities, science and technology.
Creative thought is not the exclusive domain of artists; it is rather a basic and essential function of the human brain that enables us to solve problems and see the familiar in new and enlightening ways. In this process of re-viewing we might claim to be in not only a visual but also a metonymic age, one in which meaning expansion through proximal relations is understood as a significant force for creativity, and one in which metonymy and metaphor are appreciated as cognitive equals.

Initial findings identify two distinct domain-internal phenomena. The first of these draws new meaning from the interaction of the artefact with its context and from absent-but-known part-whole relations. The second phenomenon occurs when differences are discerned between closely related co-present elements, in which meaning expands from a less comprehensive physical category to a more comprehensive absent but-known category (noting that category reduction offers little or no creative potential).