Synecdoche

Synecdoche is trope—a word or phrase from the Ancient Greek word for “turn”—that represents a thing or concept in terms of another, typically substituting a part for the whole or whole for the part. From the Greek word synekdoche, meaning “receiving together,” synecdoche operates through a connection or relationship in which the part represents the whole (pars pro toto) or the whole for the part (totum pro parte). For example, “All hands on deck” or “Brazil won the World Cup” are both synecdoche. “Hands” and “deck” are both representative parts of the sailors’ bodies and the ship, respectively, whereas “Brazil” constitutes the whole of the nation that stands in for the players on the national soccer team. A synecdoche requires an intrinsic relationship between the part and the whole: a ship must have a deck and only a Brazilian citizen may play for Brazil’s national soccer team. In each case, the representative word highlights the most important feature of that relationship, in that the “hands” are the necessary feature of the sailor’s labor or “Brazil” suggests a soccer team’s victory is a national success. The intrinsic relationship extends to other pairings, as rhetorical and literary theorist Kenneth Burke notes, such as cause for effect, container for contained, genus for species, and vice versa. Synecdoche, however, is more than a literary device used to stylize rhetorical discourse. This entry provides a historical overview of synecdoche and its relationship to other tropes and the ways scholars use synecdoche to advance rhetorical criticism.

There is some scholarly debate, evident in the work of Roman Jakobson and Umberto Eco, as to whether synecdoche is a subspecies of another trope, metaphor, or metonymy, or if it is a completely separate trope. Metaphor relies on substituting one word for another, drawing a comparison between the two objects or concepts. Metonymy possesses a representational quality, reducing the object or concept to an attribute. Metonymy commonly reduces an intangible concept into a tangible attribute that is associated with, but not part of, the concept or object. For example, “the pen is mightier than the sword” highlights how communication is more powerful than violence; the intangible concepts of communication and violence are [Page 1744]reduced to instruments associated with their practice.

The Greek philosopher and author of The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle considered synecdoche a subcategory of metaphor, but other scholars developed it into its own unique trope. Roman rhetorician Quintilian, in Institutes of Oratory, described synecdoche as a species of metaphor that is a form of rhetorical ornamentation more salient for poets than orators. French philosopher Petrus Ramus first elevated synecdoche to sit alongside metaphor, metonymy, and irony as rhetorical and literary devices that constitute the four master tropes, or the four basic tropes from which all other tropes emerge. The scheme of four master tropes influenced the work of many others, who used the tropes to provide new insights into the role of language, thought, and knowledge. For example, Italian rhetorical theorist and legal philosopher Giambatistta Vico noted that the four basic or sincere tropes formed the essence of a mental language that shapes thought, or how we come to understand the world. Vico argued that each trope represents a stage in the history of humankind and human conscious thought, where humans attempted to explain the unknown using such tropes. For example, all civilizations initially used human emotions to describe events in nature, such as thunder. This form of explaining is fundamentally metaphorical. As human civilizations advance, the tropes used to describe the unknown change. Synecdoche, for Vico, represents the age of humans, where the foundations of humanistic knowledge, such as science, emerge.

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