Author(s)

Jiang Yaru ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ College of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Corresponding Author

Jiang Yaru

ABSTRACT

Many scholars have noticed the metaphorical meaning of things that are concerned with food. But the metonymic mechanisms in food naming sometimes are ignored by people. In daily life, food of the same type may have different ways of being named. For example, both as sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches are easier to accept than chicken bird sandwiches. This study employs prototype theory and metonymy from cognitive linguistics to investigate the divergent naming patterns in "tuna fish sandwiches" versus "chicken bird sandwiches. The analysis reveals that on the one hand, "tuna" is a non-prototypical member of the "fish" category due to its atypical features, contrasting with prototypical fish. Adding "fish" resolves referential vagueness by suppressing these deviant traits and anchoring tuna within the target category. In addition, “fish" functions as a metonymic operator, activating the "aquatic vertebrate-edible material" schema, thus explicitly signalling the food source. On the other hand, "bird" is unsuitable as a food category modifier due to biological traits conflicting with edibility, and cultural symbolism inhibiting its culinary association. Adding "bird" to "chicken" creates cognitive dissonance. Besides, "chicken" itself exhibits strong metonymic entrenchment, where its culinary meaning has semantically overshadowed its zoological referent, rendering "bird" redundant. In conclusion, the necessity of a category term hinges on the prototype status of the entity, cognitive salience of the category, and socio-cultural conventionalization, governed by principles of cognitive economy.

KEYWORDS

Prototype, Metonymy, Tuna Fish Sandwiches, Chicken Bird Sandwiches

CITE THIS PAPER

Jiang Yaru, Prototypes and Metonymy in Food Naming—A Case Study of Tuna Fish Sandwiches vs Chicken Bird Sandwiches. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2025) Vol. 8: 1-5. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2025.080401.

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