Abstract

In most of the proposals about metonymy it is argued that it is a figure of signification or trope that exploits a figurative or transferred meaning. These proposals lose sight of what the examples that we normally consider metonymy have in common, to wit, that they are understood if we complete the metonymic noun phrase and not if we substitute it by another. It is in this sense that we understand that referential metonymy is a case of ellipsis and, thus, a figure of language or scheme whose mechanism of interpretation is intimately related to the mechanism of retrieval of expressions.