A textual perspective on referential metonymy

Abstract

Within the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), metonymy has not attracted much attention in comparison to other approaches such as cognitive linguistics where it has a more prominent place. This paper aims to examine referential metonymy from the perspective of the SFL framework and to offer a theoretical argument for how it can be accounted for within existing SFL constructs. The main idea pursued here is that referential metonymy, as a type of indirect encoding of meaning, might be best accounted for in terms of incongruency. Bringing together perspectives from outside SFL and drawing on Martin’s (1992) IDENTIFICATION system, I make the case for referential metonymy to be interpreted in terms of textual grammatical metaphor due to the atypical referential mappings and the blended semantics construed by these expressions.