This book contains 6 Chpts. and a Conclusion that analyze the mapping linking mental spaces in the process of meaning construction. Attested data involve counterfactuals, time, tense and mood, opacity, metaphor, fictive motion, grammatical constructions, and quantification over cognitive domains. These phenomena evidence cognitive processes such as analogical mappings, conceptual integration and blending, discourse management, induction, recursion, cross-space mapping, access and spreading principles, space tracking by viewpoint and focus shift, matching, and structure projection. Despite their rapid occurrence, these processes are not consciously noticeable or linguistically encoded. Rather, language provides underspecified contextual clues that prompt cognitive configurations and pre-structured backgrounds. It is concluded that a single set of principles accounts for high-level scientific, artistic, and literary thought as well as basic comprehension and sentence meaning. This analysis implies that the cognitive processes responsible for constructing linguistic semantics also drive nonlinguistic reasoning and comprehension. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (L. Lucht in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 5)