Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

It is common for languages to express multiple meanings with the same word, a phenomenon known as colexification. For instance, the meanings FINGER and TOE colexify in the word “dedo” in Spanish, while they do not colexify in English. Colexification has been suggested to follow universal constraints. In particular, previous work has shown that related meanings are more prone to colexify. This tendency has been explained in terms of the cognitive pressure for ease, since expressing related meanings with the same word makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and a competing universal constraint, the functional pressure for languages to maximize informativeness. We hypothesize that meanings are more likely to colexify if they are related (fostering ease), but not so related as to become confusable and cause misunderstandings (fostering informativeness). We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal principles shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures.