Metonymy in English Medical Terminology

Abstract

The article considers the mechanisms of metonymical transposition in English medical terminology. Material of the research is the corpus of scholarly articles listed in the electronic database of medical publications “PubMed”. Metonymy involves the comparison of subjects on the basis of their contiguity, presence of certain time, spatial or causal relationships. The basic categories of medical terms created by metonymical transfer of meanings have been analyzed. The functions and text-producing potential of metonymy in medical discourse have been determined. The main contextual situations within which the metonymized terminological units function have been considered. The study has found that metonymical transposition results in the emergence of multiple meanings of medical terms – terminological polysemy. Medical terminology displays several productive models of metonymical transfer: “the process – the subject”; “the process – the result of the process”; “the material – the subject” and so on. Along with common cases of metonymical transposition, specific models, characteristic only of medical terminology are observed: “the process – the surgery”; “the organ – the part of the organ”; “the disease – the consequence of the disease”; “the organ – the disease”; “the organ – the organ deformation”.