A chained metonymic approach to ίdὸ ‘eye’ constructional metonymies in Hausa

Abstract

Abstract Unlike previous studies which generally seem to focus more on Hausa metaphorical expressions, this study investigates a wide range of uses of ίdὸ ‘eye’ in its constructional metonymy patterns in the language by exploring corpus data that contain over 300 eye-related expressions. We observe that some constructional metonymies maintain a set of fixed words and syntax in activating conceptual shifts and producing eye metonymies while others have semi-fixed patterns and produce the same metonymies. Lexical items like tsόkάlế, kὰn, ὰ, dὰ, and bὰsίrὰ among others are constant constituents in the constructional metonymies in which they appear. In the metonymic chaining, the basic mapping of eye metonymies occurs via the part for part relation under E-metonymies and the sub- for supercategory relation under C-metonymies. We also observe that E→E→C coding has the highest chained metonymic structure in the creation of the eye metonymies. Both attributive and predicative colligates motivate metonymic senses in the language. Finally, our analysis reveals that the eye is metonymically conceptualized and semantically extended to various target domains and produces metonymic conceptualizations that make the eye stand for vision, desire, envy, control, attention, perception, person, meeting, brain, intelligence, and so on.