Synecdoche vs Metonymy

[jack]

In a manful effort to remember which is which, I looked these words up *again*.

It looks like, "synecdoche" means using a part to represent the whole, eg. "how many heads" in a herd of cattle, or "how many bums" in a theatre, or "nice wheels" referring to a whole car. But is also used for the reverse, using a whole to represent a part, eg. "what does Brussels think" referring to the European parliament.

I couldn't tell why the second meaning was included, but secondarily, if the first meaning came first, and then people started using it both ways round, or something else. Nor if only the first meaning is "correct" and the second is a mistake, or if both are equally accepted.

Apparently "metonymy" means "using a closely related concept to represent a thing". Eg. using "suits" for "lawyers" or "businesspeople", or "the pen is mightier than the sword" to mean "the written word is mightier than force of arms".

So the real difference between "synecdoche" and "metonymy" is different history and connotations, which I don't really understand. But in terms of literal meaning, the only difference is "using a part to represent the whole" vs "using one concept to represent another".

But, obviously, human pattern matching means if you mostly use synecdoche in the "part for a whole" sense, then the most common use of metonymy is "whole for a part", even if it could be used for other things.

Can anyone fill in the gaps here?

Comments

[vyvyanx]

These terms, along with metaphor, often appear close together in lists of rhetorical figures at the end of traditional grammars of Latin and Greek (and of course, all three words are derived from classical Greek). But they are also generally included in historical linguistics textbooks under classifications of semantic change (because yesterday's rhetorical flourishes often become today's standard usage). There's a lot of overlap between the three (e.g. one of my textbooks calls synecdoche a type of metonymy, and notes that both synecdoche and metonymy are only "somewhat different" from metaphor; another says "the categories of semantic change in this classification are not necessarily distinct from one another"), but there are also some examples where you can say moderately clearly that it's one rather than another.

So, synecdoche (part of a thing to stand for all of a thing, or vice versa) could be illustrated with "Spain are playing Germany in the World Cup" (whole for part), or "all hands on deck" (part for whole). Metonymy (generally a shift in meaning to something associated in the physical context) could be exemplified with the etymology of the word "cheek" which in Old English usually meant "jawbone", or using "the Crown" to refer to the monarch (a crown is not part of a monarch, nor is a monarch part of a crown!). And metaphor typically involves creating a conceptual link between apparently unrelated semantic areas e.g. using "head" to refer to the leader of an organisation, or "root" to refer to the origin of a word...

[jack]

Thank you

[ptc24]

As I understand it, synecdoche is a type of metonymy. I personally use "metonymy" in all cases. Wikipedia seems to have an account of it that matches my experience; some people consider metonymy to be the hypernym of synecdoche, others consider it a sister term.

Wikipedia says there are similar issues with simile and metaphor. My idea of "proper useage" thinks that the two are sister terms, whereas I keep sliding into using "metaphor" to cover everything, including similies.

I think there's a special twist to "suits" - I think there's often a dab of "stuffed suits" or "empty suits" - i.e. some sort of metaphor. The suggestion of emptiness doesn't seem to apply to some other metonyms; I can't hear it in "Fleet Street" for instance.