| This paper sets out to examine the universality of metonymy, which is deemed one of the basic means of human thought and cognition. To serve the purpose, "mouth/tooth/lip/tongue -speech" metonymies in Chinese, English and Japanese were selected as the object of study to probe whether the present theory of metonymy provides a reasonable explanation of the formation of the selected metonymies, how the continuum of metonymy and metaphor is reflected in those metonymies, and whether the common point of the metonymies in the three languages is a mirror of the cognitive universality of human beings.The corpus used in the research was collected from a variety of dictionaries. It was found that the "mouth/tooth/lip/tongue-speech" metonymies were established according to Causation ICM. The selection of vehicles of the metonymies proved to be the result of the interwoven influence of multiple principles and factors. Evidence of the continuum of metonymy and metaphor was also revealed in some cases. The findings of a contrastive study of the inner & outer system of "mouth/tooth/lip/tongue - speech" metonymies in the three languages were as follows: "mouth" and "tongue" were two dominant vehicles of the metonymies in the three languages, which could be explained adequately by the theory of metonymy. Except for "tooth", the other three vehicles ("mouth", "lip" and "tongue") shared the same dominant target, "speech", which indicated the salient relationship between "mouth organs" and "speech" that could be taken as one example of the cognitive universalities shared by people of different cultures.The findings above suggest the universalities of metonymy as one of the basic means of human cognition. Metonymies in different languages may share a common vehicle or target, belong to the same type of metonymy-producing relationships, or be restricted by the same principles or factors, which supports the belief that cognitive universalities do exist, due to the common construction of human brain.
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