The present volume evolved from a workshop on metonymy held at Hamburg University on June 23 and 24, 1996. This conference was probably the first international meeting of scholars from Europe, North America and Asia which was exclusively devoted to the study of metonymy in language and thought. Eighteen years after Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) seminal work on the role of metaphor in conceptualization, which sparked a vast amount of research in cognitive linguistics, it has become increasingly apparent that metonymy is a cognitive phenomenon that may be even more fundamental than metaphor. We believe that the contributions give a fair view of the state of the art in metonymic research, although we are also aware of the fact that a great many questions about metonymy still remain unanswered, some of which will be addressed. (Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden)