The articles in this special issue of 'Metaphor and Symbolic Activity' grew out of a symposium on nonliteral language that was held at the 1993 meeting of the American Psychological Society. The symposium's title, "Nonliteral Language: Processing and Use," refers to the two aspects of figuration that frame contemporary research on this topic. On the one hand, nonliteral language poses challenges for theories of semantics and the cognitive processing of language. On the other hand, nonliteral language interpretation is heavily influenced by social and contextual factors and continues to challenge theorists and researchers in pragmatics. It can be argued that language theorists have not always risen to the challenges posed by nonliteral language. Many of the early models of language production and comprehension failed to address the figurative uses of language. More recently, some of the language models proposed by cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers have not addressed the social functions of nonliteral language. With the articles in this issue, we hope to redress some of these problems. We have focused on two classes of figurative language: irony and metaphor. (Roger Kreuz and Shelly Dews)