Is metonymy really more regular than metaphor? A first investigation into the French Lexicon
Is metonymy really more regular than metaphor? A first investigation into the French Lexicon

Summary/Abstract: Regular polysemy is considered more intrinsically linked to metonymy than to metaphor in bothlinguistic and psycholinguistic literature. Yet, on the one hand, metonymy exhibits varying degreesof regularity, and on the other hand, metaphor is also subject to polysemic regularity. This paperaims to assess the extent to which metonymy and metaphor exhibit regularity in the lexicon. Basedon the analysis of lexicographic descriptions of a sample of nearly 3,000 French nouns, this studycompares the regularity of polysemy patterns—defined as recurring sense alternations—withinthe two types of figures. While the findings confirm theoretical assumptions by identifying moreregular metonymic patterns than regular metaphoric ones, they reveal, on average, no significantdifference between metonymy and metaphor in terms of regularity. The resulting dataset is publiclyavailable to allow further exploration of how regular polysemy emerges in the lexicon and its correlationwith lexical figures.

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