Blurb:

This chapter focuses on formal metonymy, which is the metonymy based on a formal relation between the vehicle and the target. The most obvious cases of formal metonymy are alphabetisms, acronyms, clips and various kinds of ellipsis in syntax. Examples of such formal metonyms are further discussed. In addition, it is shown that formal metonymy may underlie a number of spelling conventions as well as syntactic and pragmatic phenomena.