Metaphor and Metonymy: Similarities and Differences

Metaphor and metonymy are treated as two different figures of speech in traditional rhetoric. In modern theories of metaphor, metonymy is often regarded as a subtype of metaphor and gets a bare mention. In this paper, the author analyzes the two important phenomena in terms of their structures, functions and working mechanisms. While recognizing their similarities in certain respects, the author suggests that they are two fundamentally different cognitive devices, with metaphor involving things from two different domains and metonymy involving the properties of something and its special relations with other things. Metaphor is cognitively more useful since people often create metaphors to understand a relatively less well-known domain of things in terms of things from relatively better-known domains. As metonymy basically involves using a special property of something or its special relationship with other things to refer to it, its major function is to help the hearer to locate or recognize the referent and its special characteristics.