The article is devoted to the problem of cognitive bases for metonymy. Metonymy belongs to stylistic devices widely used in the language. There are a lot of papers written on metonymy as a stylistic device. Most of them take the traditional linguistic point of view. But it does not help to answer some other deeper questions concerning the nature and cognitive mechanisms of metonymy, which can be default and stylistically marked. In order to disclose the true nature of this language phenomenon we can apply the cognitive notions of concept, conceptualization, metonymic relationships, idealized cognitive model.