Taking under scrutiny figurative language the book discusses a wide range of notions including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending along with tools necessary to analyze them. These are presented against the background of cognitive linguistic theory and such concepts as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint. The data analyzed is both crosslinguistic and crossmodal; in addition to examining word meanings and linguistic constructions within cross-linguistic contexts, the authors focus on figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. The book consists of nine chapters: Introduction, The basics of metaphor, Metaphoric structure: levels and relations, Mental spaces and blending, Metonymy, Grammatical constructions and figurative meaning, The crosslinguistic study of metaphor, Figurative language in discourse, and Concluding remarks.