"The emeralds of your face" : metaphor and metonymy in some expressions

Abstract

The present paper elaborates on some of the ideas in Ruiz de Mendoza and Díez (2002), where it is argued that conceptual interaction is fully regulated and constrained by a limited set of interactional patterns. This paper attempts to provide further evidence in support of this thesis through the analysis and exploration of several "eye expressions" (among others to keep an eye on someone, to turn a blind eye to something, to feast one's eyes on something, to be the owner of somebody's eyes, to be the apple of somebody's eyes, etc.), representative of various interactional patterns, and that have been extracted after an exhaustive analysis of more than 500 instances from both the BNC and the Oxford Superlex Dictionary database.On the basis of the analysis of the various patterns, we postulate two possible interaction operations, sequencing and integration, and argue that understanding these two operations sheds light on the definitional relationship between metaphor and metonymy. We also claim that the form sequential arrangement takes in an interactional pattern is related to the ontological status of the result of an integration process.