Metonymic Motivation of Linguistic Structure

ICM plays a key role in the understanding and production of metonymy. Metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity provides mental access to another conceptual entity within the same idealized cognitive model. Based on the degree of genericity and the ontological nature of domains, metonymies can be classified into two kinds, high-level metonymies and low-level metonymies. High-level metonymies directly make use of generic ICMs, and have a great impact on linguistic structure, thus boasting grammaticality. It is easy to find the impact of grammatical metonymies on linguistic structures via analyzing imperative structure, the recategorization of words and predication structure as well as “What” interrogative construction.