For a long time the study of metonymy has rated second best in comparison to the amount of effort devoted to the understanding of the closely related phenomenon of metaphor. This was the case in the work of ancient rhetoricians who thought of metonymy as a 'trope' or figure of speech. And it is also the general feeling that arises from a quick look at the literature produced by cognitive linguists about this topic. Within the cognitivist tradition, metonymy has been promoted from being regarded as a mere rhetorical figure to the status of a mental mechanism underlying many aspects of human conceptualization. In this, the relevance of metonymy as a cognitive strategy of knowledge organization is comparable to that of metaphor. Nevertheless, while metaphor has been discussed at length by cognitive linguists 1, metonymy has attracted a considerably smaller amount of attention. This phenomenon is treated rather briefly in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff and Turner (1989), Lakoff (1987), and Taylor (1995), where metonymy is set apart from metaphor, only to devote the largest part of the discussion to the latte