Forty years of metonymy: The time-measurement pseudo-partitive construction in English

Abstract

This study contributes to the existing body of research that aims at showing the impact of metonymy in grammar. In this case, new evidence will be provided by exploring the English pseudo-partitive construction of time measurement, illustrated by ten years of marriage. By using corpus data, it will be shown that metonymy is at work in many instantiations of this construction. The second noun in these expressions should prima facie be semantically eligible for time measurement, that is, a temporal entity or a second-order entity. However, this is not the only type of noun that appears in the second noun slot, which can also be occupied by first and third-order entities as well as places. The presence of an expression of time-measurement in the first part of the construction coerces different ontological categories into a second-order reading and can be regarded as a guide for the correct interpretation when the second noun includes several facets, illustrating the cognitive process of cueing.