Metonymy and Euphemisms

In the previous chapter I presented the default cases of metonymy and how cognitive and communicative principles govern the selection of a preferred metonymic vehicle. These principles enable us to understand why we choose certain entities to access a target and why some vehicle-to-target routes have been conventionalized in the language. However, it sometimes occurs that cognitive and communicative principles are overridden because of the speaker’s expressive needs or a particular social situation. The violation of the principles in question may result in the use of metonymy – based euphemisms which I will try to explore in the following discussion. As it was mentioned before, there are certain cognitive and communicative principles which account for the choice of preferred metonymic vehicles. Among cognitive principles we distinguish for example, the HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN, the CONCRETE OVER ABSTRACT, the GOOD GESTALT OVER POOR GESTALT or the SPECIFIC OVER GENERIC principle. Kovecses and Radden (1998: 45-50) notice that cognitive principles mainly contribute to human experience, perceptual selectivity and cultural preference. Most of the people’s conceptualizations is affected by our human experiences and perceptions. Thus, we attach greater importance to things that we can easily perceive and interact with. Cultural preferences are also significant factors in determining our choice of certain vehicles in metonymy. Therefore, we often select the stereotypical, ideal or typical members of a category to stand for that category. In the example He has a great heart the cognitive principle CONCRETE OVER ABSTRACT is applied. The hearer encounters no difficulty in understanding the metonymy since we tend to refer to concrete physical object which are more salient than abstract entities. Thus the hearer knows that the speaker is talking about a person who is very kind and not about one whose heart has a large size. The default selection of a metonymic