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Page 80
referentsexplains metonymy to us. We name the king by the crown only because there is a factual contiguity between king and crown (the fact that the king wears a crown is a fact, not a linguistic phenomenon). But then, again, if the fact of naming the crown refers us by force of analogy to the king, it also retransforms the metonymic explanation into an explanation founded on similarity. There is a natural resemblance, due to the habit of contiguity, that pushes for recognition of the king in the crown.
Notice, however, that if by some chance an employee of the property-tax office whom I know wears spectacles, I cannot name, in a figurative discourse, the employees of the property-tax office by spectacles. This contiguity would not be recognizable and, in any case, even if recognized, it would not be sufficient to found the metonymic substitution. It must be that (by recognized and codified habit) all (or a large number of) employees of the property-tax office wear spectacles for it to be possible to operate the substitution by contiguity. Now, there was a time when all (or most) of the employees wore white collars on their shirts. This contiguity was codified, and only at that moment was it possible to designate the employees as 'white-collar workers'; even if today there are no employees wearing white collars, one can recognize that this contiguity is capable of founding a metonymic substitution. This is a sign that the contiguity is no longer factual, but semiotic. What matters is, not that in reality someone wears white collars, but that in a semantic representation of the lexeme /employee/ there exists the connotation «wears white collars».
The contiguity on which the metonymic transposition is founded is thus transformed from factual (empirical) contiguity to contiguity of code. The referent no longer carries any weight, and neither does the possibility of recognizing the metonymized term by a natural kinship with the metonymizing term. The kinship is not natural; it is cultural. The two terms refer to each other because they are conventionally situated each in the place of the other. The metonymizing term is already part of the semantic representation of the metonymized term, as one of its interpretants. The rhetorical rule presupposes, then, that one can name a lexeme by one of the semantic components of the corresponding sememe. A study of efficient and comprehensible metonymies would lead to the discovery that they employ, as metonymizing, a semantic component that belongs exclusively to one particular lexeme and not another. The mark «male» is also a semantic component of the lexeme /king/, but no one would use /male/ as a metonymy of /king/. /Crown/ is used because only the king wears a crown. We can thus imagine a robot constructed in order to recognize metonymies, provided that it has been programmed for the following: ''replace the metonymizing term with that sememe, unique

 
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