Metonymy in the semantic field of verbal communication: A corpus-based analysis of word

• A corpus-based study of metalinguistic word in present-day English was carried out.
• Metonymic uses (55%) of word are more frequent than metaphorical uses (24%).
• The two forms of the lemma word display different semantic profiles.
• Abstract word is figuratively richer than previously studied body part nouns.
• Metonymic uses are more conventionalized in nature than basic uses.

Language about language has been studied above all from the perspective of metaphor, neglecting metonymy. This study tests the hypothesis that metonymy is also central within the semantic field of communication. A bottom-up, empirical study of word—one of the most frequent nouns in English—was carried out, based on 4000 tokens from the British National Corpus. word was found to be highly figurative, with metonymic uses (55%) being considerably more frequent than metaphorical uses (24%), but with some overlap, and with the two forms of the lemma displaying different profiles. Although largely an abstract noun, word is even richer in figurative meaning than previously studied body part nouns. The core meaning of word refers to the grammatical word, but it is frequently extended through metonymy—and especially synecdoche—to stand for units of communication of varying scope; these are mapped out in the study. The metonymic meanings were found to be more conventionalized in nature than the basic meanings. Metonymy is shown to be a robust phenomenon that, at least in the semantic field of verbal communication, may be more significant than the vastly more-studied phenomenon of metaphor.