Salience as Informativity : A Pragmatic Approach to Metonymy

This paper examines the nature of salience that motivates metonymy and argues that salience is essentially a matter of informativity. Traditional studies proposed some principles about salience such as whole over part or relevant over irrelevant, which can interact or override each other. I propose instead that metonymy is best analyzed as a form of omission motivated by the low informativity of the target. Informativity is the degree to which a linguistic element satisfies the hearer's informational needs by providing content that is unpredictable and relevant to the immediate topic. This concept is useful for analyzing the contextual factors which motivate metonymy.