Of the various internal ramifications within CL, the following major strands are discussed: 1) A gestalt-psychology-based strand, initiated and explored by Talmy, and worked out in great detail by Langacker, and in his line, by Kemmer, Achard, Taylor, Verhagen etc. A different specification of the gestalt principle is realized in construction grammar developed by Goldberg, Michaelis, Croft, etc.; 2) A phenomenology-based strand, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, and explored by Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and, from a different vantage point, also by Geeraerts. Here belong prototype theory, lexical network theory, conceptual metaphor theory, and conceptual metonymy theory with inroads into cognitive pragmatics with Barcelona, Radden, Ruiz de Mendoza, Panther, Thornburg, etc. 3) A discourse strand, worked out in different directions: in the direction of conceptual integration by scholars of mental-space theory and blending theory like Fauconnier, Turner, Oakley, Coulson; in the direction of cognitive poetics by Freeman, Semino, Herman, Steen, etc., and in the direction of cognitive discourse study, focusing on coherence and mental representation by a group around Noordman; 4) A cognitive sociolinguistics strand, scouted out for variation in lexical semantics by Geeraerts, Grondelaers et al., for ideology research by Lakoff and his students, and by Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and many others, and for cultural models by Morgan, Frank, and other contributions to Dirven et al., or the earlier studies in Holland & Quinn; 5) A psycholinguistic strand, represented by Gibbs et al.. for figurative-language processing, and by Tomasello, Rice, Sandra, etc.. for language acquisition. (René Dirven)