To provide a context for the essays published here, this introduction to the special issue on metonymy highlights a number of aspects of the cognitive-linguistic discussion of metonymy of the past twenty-five years. It briefly sketches the development of metonymy studies in poetics, linguistics, and philosophy, emphasizing that the cognitive-linguistic approach to metonymy of the past decades represents a return to the semantic views of metonymy advocated in structuralist semantics. This development was triggered by the extensive study of metaphor, but metonymy has now emancipated itself. (Gerard Steen)