The study focuses on conceptual mappings and their impact on word productivity, within the Cognitive Linguistics framework. The author assumes that metonymic and metaphoric mappings are involved in the understanding of grammatical phenomena and, more specifically, in derivation. For this reason, the study comprises empirical research which supports the previous argument. The empirical part consists of a questionnaire with non-words which end with the suffixes –ize (i.e. gossipize), -ify (i.e. bossify), -dom (i.e. cookdom), -ship (i.e. academyship) and –hood (i.e. dragonhood). These non-words were accompanied by potential interpretations, and the 324 participants, who joined the study, were asked to choose which one would be the optimal. Moreover, these suggested interpretations ranged from literal to figurative ones. All in all, the doctoral dissertation explores the cognitive processes that were activated when the particular derivatives/ non-words were processed, and draws conclusions over figuration in general.