Metaphor and metonymy

Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes of binarily opposed polarities which between them underpin the two-fold process of selection and combination by which linguistic signs are formed . . . .

Thus messages are constructed, as Saussure said, by a combination of a 'horizontal' movement, which combines words together, and a 'vertical' movement, which selects the particular words from the available inventory or 'inner storehouse' of the language. The combinative (or syntagmatic) process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being places next to another) and its mode is metonymic. The selective (or associative) process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept being 'like' another) and its mode is metaphoric. (Hawkes, pp. 77-8.)

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Problems of reading

The way that a paradox of self-reflexivity is revealed is in the fact that a reader is reading a text in terms of the way it thematizes the problems of reading.

In this way we can read the text as rigorously as possible in terms of what the text itself—as a rhetorical entity—makes possible, even necessary. In other words the text makes a claim (at the level of its statement) on behalf of the value of presence, according to which the most essential figurative tropes are metaphorical as opposed to metonymical. But in the performance the text reveals a praxis (the Greek word for action or practice in the sense of something that one habitually does)—i.e., it achieves its effects—through metonymic combinations, which ground the metaphorical substitutions.

Grammatical structures and tropes

In literary structuralism, especially in France, the analysis of deep grammatical structures went hand in hand with the analysis of rhetorical tropes (figures of discourse).

What this means is that the two axes of language, the syntagmatic (at the level of the generated sentence) and the paradigmatic (the axis of substitutions) can be read as operating together in a discourse. We can thus explain what Paul de Man means by “assimilations of rhetorical transformations or combinations to syntactical, grammatical patterns” with reference to the coexistence in structuralist theory of patterns of both metonymy (which is syntagmatic) and metaphor (which is paradigmatic).

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