Blurb:

This chapter by Antonio Barcelona Sánchez argues for the role of conceptual metonymy as a crucial motivating factor in some instances of the three main types of morphosyntactic alternations which, in the author’s view, can be discerned: (i) the conventional pairing of a basic form with more than one basic constructional meaning; (ii) the conventional pairing of a basic constructional meaning with more than one uninflected form; and (iii) the model-variant relationship of two constructions within the same network. Instances from the following morphosyntactic areas are discussed: suffixal derivation, conversion, abbreviatory lexical forms and ellipsis, and syntactic constructions.