For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for Poorer, in Sickness and in Health: A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach to Merism

ABSTRACT This paper is a qualitative usage-based treatment of merism from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considered a minor or non-basic figure of speech, especially if compared to the master tropes, metaphor and metonymy, merism is approached here as a figure of speech whose complexity has been largely and unfairly underestimated. We provide a principled account of the relationship of merism with metonymy starting off from the well-known assumption that merism is a particular kind of synecdoche. The notion of merism is delimited and used in its etymological sense, which serves as a starting point for a two-fold classification of this figurative use into contrast-based merism and merism in which contrast plays no role (bare merism). We also explore the constructions which might trigger meristic uses and the characteristics of the terms involved in meristic binomials and trinomials which make them readily available for fusion into specific syntactic patterns like “X and Y,” “both X and Y,” “X and Y alike,” “X as well as Y,” and “X, Y, and Z.”