The present volume is the first of two volumes of the 7th International Pragmatics Conference (Budapest, Hungary, July 9–14, 2000) proceedings, it is a collection of all selected articles related to the special topic of the conference Cognition in language use. The diversity of current cognitive pragmatic research is reflected both in the range of topics covered in the papers and the variety of approaches. The articles in this volume provide a wide spectrum of state of the art investigations into cognitively oriented pragmatics.