Metonymy and Croatian adverbial clauses

Abstract

In this article I examine some metonymic aspects of the semantics of Croatian connectives introducing adverbial clauses of cause, condition, purpose, and concession. The analysis leans on the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy and, to a lesser extent, on cognitive grammar. It is also informed by grammaticalization scholarship within typological functionalism. I explore metonymic mappings between the categories of time and cause, manner and cause, cause and condition, purpose, cause and concession, condition and concession, time and condition, and metonymic mappings operating at the level of speech acts. The goal is to contribute to the growing, though still arguably small, body of cognitive linguistic research into the relevance of metonymy for the semantics of complex sentences, specifically the role it plays in subordination, and to expand this analysis to subordinate constructions in Croatian. Some attention is given to grammaticalization studies, where metaphor and metonymy are seen as two types of pragmatic inferencing facilitating interactions between the mentioned semantic categories in complex sentences.