This volume contains seven synchronic and diachronic empirical investigations into the expression and conceptualization of linguistic action in English, focusing on figurative extensions. The following issues are explored: 1. source domains, and their relation to the complexities of linguistic action as a target domain; 2 the role of axiological parameter, the experiential grounding of metaphors expressing value judgements and the part played by image-schemata, how value judgements come about and their socio-cultural embedding; 3 the graded character of metaphoricity and its correlation with degrees of recoverability/salience; 4 The interaction of metonymy and metaphor, e.g. the question what factors motivate the conventionalization of metonymies, which includes the perspective that conventionalized metaphors frequently have a metonymic origin; 5 the role of image-schemata in the organization and development of a lexical subfield, which raises new questions on the nature of metaphor, the identification of source and target domains and the Invariance Hypothesis.