A metonymy involves “a salient close association or ‘contiguity’ (in the world) between the distinct categories of thing denoted, for example, an institution and the building where its activities take place, a container and its contents, a place and an event that took place there, and so forth” (Carston 2021:112). Metonymy differs from instances of actual ‘reference transfer’ (e.g., The ham sandwich is sitting at table 20), in which the shift is supported only by a specific discourse situation (Fauconnier 1994; Nunberg 1979). Little research on L2 metonymy acquisition has been carried out, with the existing studies being exclusively focused on L2 English (e.g., Bowerman et al. 2021; Chen & Lai 2014;Slabakova et al. 2013, 2016). This study investigates L2 Korean metonymy comprehension by L1 English speakers to discover the relative role of conceptual universal and conventionalization in interlanguage sense extensions in the nominal domain.
An acceptability judgment task and a sense identification task revealed that L2 Korean metonymy knowledge was in place from the beginning, and conventional metonymy and pragmatic reference transfer were treated differently in significant ways. Hence, rather clear evidence was found for both conceptual universal and a role of conventionalization in L1 and L2 Korean. The results pointed to the need to reconcile radical pragmatics and rule-based approaches to metonymy in linguistics. I suggest that these theories describe different stages of metonymy development and that L2 learners comprehend metonymy easily thanks to their already existing knowledge about the reference function that allows metonymic sense extension. The specific content of the metonymy merely needs to be filled in by experiential input.