In his lexical-semantic study Paul Pauwels investigates the metonymic structure of four related verbs: 'put, set, lay', and 'place'. Pauwels' corpus-based investigation shows that the majority of examples were not of the traditional nominal or referential kind. In his corpus, metonymy often seems to function as a "euphemistic avoidance strategy". But it can also serve as a focusing strategy, which, in extreme cases, may result in dysphemism. The most frequent metonymic type Pauwels encounters in his corpus is based on a relation of inclusion, where a more general concept stands for a more specific concept, or vice versa. (Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden)