“Her blue eyes are red. A Conceptual Model of Color Metonym”,

How do English speakers conceptualize color experience through the crossmodal processing of visual perception and linguistic expression in distinguishing the whole and its parts? The lexical frame of color as a primary experience is often used to exemplify linguistic theories and yet there is still lack of a complete conceptual color model. Cognitive linguistics establishes a central role to meaning through the ideas of embodied experience, image schemas, and conceptual models developed through usage-based analysis. Conceptual metonym-metaphor mapping is a type of representation used to comprehend how linguistic elaboration of complex categories arises through embodied metonymical and metaphorical extension, resulting in a motivated illustration of lexical polysemy. In this paper the author presents the fifth level of a complete conceptual mapping (the other four levels have been presented in Sandford 2010, 2011a,b). The new part of this original mapping is Conceptual Color Metonym: relations between part-whole, part-part, whole-whole. Conceptual metonymic mapping, and the ties it establishes with primary metaphor, gives support to argumentation on how colors terms activate neural circuits that constitute conceptual metaphor mechanisms, in keeping with the neural theory of metaphor.