When we turned to a cognitive view of figurative language we somehow lost sight of the role played by metonymy in our conceptualization of the world. However, expressions like ‘talks between London and Paris’ indicate that this phenomenon also play an important part in everyday language. Besides, cognitive linguists and philosophers have indicated that metonymy is a mighty cognitive instrument for all human beings to experience and conceptualize the world.                                                                   

2. Literature Review                                                       

Metonymy itself is a cognitive course, during which the inter-medium (one conceptual substance) offers mental passage to the goal (another conceptual substance) in an identical idealized cognitive model (ICM). In order to figure out the relationship between the metonymy and its corresponding embodied and cognitive facets, we can turn to some previous metonymy studies in history as well as several former definitions of embodied cognition.   文献综述         

2.1 Development of Metonymy Studies                                                  

     Cognitive linguists have devoted their primary research to studying metaphorical hierarchy systems on different languages around the world since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson (1980)’s work “Metaphors We Live By”, but the cognitive study of metonymy has received relatively less attention.                                                                            

Works on metonymy have primarily focused on building definitional and typological standard, studying the metonymic grounding of metaphor, and its role in conceptual interaction from the eighties to the nineties,. Most of this research has been concerned with the conceptual level of analysis.                                                          

In 1987, Lakoff modeled metonymy in the cognitive literature as Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs). Then, Croft studies contiguity relations on the basis of encyclopedic knowledge characterization within a domain matrix in 1993. After that, Blank (1999) and Thornburg (1999) respectively use the notion of frame and scenario to represent the net of conceptual contiguity.