Earticle

Based on the observation Panther and Thornburg (1997) make regarding the exploitation of the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy in English and Hungarian, the paper has observed the same metonymy in predicational and illuocutionary domains focusing on Korean data. The result demonstrates that Korean exploits the metonymy systematically in various domains including sense perception, mental process, speech act, action, character disposition, and acquired skills. The prevalence of the metonymy in Korean, which is typologically and genetically unrelated from English and Hungarian, lends support to the idea of universality of the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy.