The traditional approach to metonymy has mainly been limited to how people refer to things and events in the "real" world. Cognitive linguists assume that metonymy is a much broader cognitive principle than has been previously recognized. In particular, we hypothesize that metonymy is instrumental in indirectly accomplishing linguistic actions such as promises, offers, requests, suggestions, and so on. In other words, just as a speaker can refer to a person by mentioning an attribute of that person, we will show that a speaker can perform a speech act by mentioning an attribute of that speech act. In other words, we want to demonstrate that indirect speech acts can be described in terms of metonymic models (in the sense of Lakoff 1987; see also Gibbs 1994). This enterprise is both theoretically and pedagogically rewarding. On the one hand, it is a step towards reconciling pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. On the other hand, it illuminates an important aspect of native speaker communicative competence that is not transparent to the non-native learner. Apart from speech acts in the traditional sense, we will briefly consider other data including "hedged performatives" (Fraser 1975), and sentences about sense perceptions and mental activities corroborating our hypothesis that speech act metonymies are just special cases of more general metonymic principles. In this study we focus on what are called "conventionalized" or "standardized" indirect speech acts of the types that Searle calls directive, commissive and expressive (see Searle 1976 for a standard classification of illocutionary acts). (Linda Thornburg and Klaus-Uwe Panther)