Abstract

Park, Chongwon. 2024. Metonymy in Korean Copular Constructions. Sign Languages and Linguistics Convergence Research, 1(1), 87-121. This article develops an analysis of the Korean copular construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective with emphasis on the metonymic type copula. By pointing out that metonymy does not occur untethered, I draw attention to the importance of defining metonymy in a verifiable way. I attempt to identify the locus of metonymy based on the definitive properties laid out in Panther & Thornburg (2007) [Panther, Klaus-Uwe & Linda L. Thornburg. 2007. Metonymy. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp.236–263)]. I then argue that information structure plays a vital role in the rise of the metonymic meaning; given information tends to induce metonymy more easily than new information because of its relative conceptual salience. It is demonstrated that the metonymic link between the source and the target content is strengthened when the source gives rise to given information, thereby narrowing the conceptual distance between the two content. This narrowed conceptual distance makes the target more accessible from the source; therefore, the locus of metonymy tends to be associated with given information. After illustrating some variations of the metonymic copular construction, I extend my discussion to the specificational pseudo-cleft construction, where the topical subject nominal also tends to undergo a metonymic shift.