Problems of unilingual and bilingual pragmatic lexicology and lexicography arising from synchronic functional description are exemplified by (1) French comparisons of the types 'Il est malin comme un singe' (He's as artful as a monkey) and 'Il grimpe comme un singe' (He climbs like a monkey); (2) metaphors derived from such comparisons, e.g. 'Il est un vrai singe' (He's a real monkey); and (3) possible Czech equivalents of (1) and (2). Analysis of (1) and (3) highlights semantic restrictions on the comparatum, effects of polysemy in the comparans and the predicate, and variation in the expressivity of comparisons. Lexicological descriptive problems are delineated from unilingual and bilingual perspectives and related to issues of lexicography. An organizational scheme is proposed for two types of bilingual dictionaries of idiomatic comparisons: French 'blanc'/Czech 'bily' (white) illustrates entries in a dictionary for expression, and French 'cochon'/Czech 'prase' (pig) illustrates those of a dictionary for comprehension. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (J. Hitchcock in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 3)