Each of the four sections of the book covers several routes of research. The first section sets the stage for the rest of the book in three significant ways: first, it gives an overview of the main orientations within CL; second, it explores the links between CL and its historical matrix, Functionalism; third, it looks for common ground among some of the major approaches to the concept of grammar within CL itself. Thus, this section allows us to look at CL as part of the more general functional enterprise while highlighting commonalities and differences among its major developments. Section 2 explores how CL and sociolinguistics may benefit from each other. Two major target areas aimed for in the contributions to this section are these: (i) to bridge the gap between the study of linguistic diversity and the idiosyncrasies of individual conceptual systems; (ii) to understand the way people conceptualize social reality in terms of cultural models concerning language varieties, linguistic groups and language behavior. This section thus explores the social perspective of issues that will be taken up in the next two sections with different degrees of emphasis on various aspects of their psychological and interactional nature. The contributions to section 3 place emphasis on the embodied nature of language and thought, studying language use and embodiment from two complementary perspectives: (i) psychological experiments on how language is understood as embodied simulation; (ii) a linguistic study of the cognitive operations involved in the construction of mental spaces and the impact of such operations in conceptual and linguistic construal and communication. While section 2 looks at language use from the point of view of the social dimension of language, section 3 examines how different aspects of language use find their counterparts in embodied thought. Section 4 follows naturally from section 3 in its exploration of communicative and usage-based issues. The section attributes an especially prominent role to the connections between cognitive model theory (with special emphasis on metaphor and metonymy) and the discourse-oriented approach to language. In this interdisciplinary perspective, metaphor and metonymy are seen as capable of creating discourse coherence through their particularly strong capacity to generate inferences. In a complementary way, this section also deals with discourse units in terms of their conceptual and communicative properties. As is evident from this brief overview, all sections cover two general topics with wide-ranging implications which are crucial to future developments of research in CL and in linguistics in general: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social interaction; and (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse links. Then there are a number of more specific topics, which are addressed from different perspectives in many of the contributions: the nature of constructions and the scope of constructional meaning; language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; meaning construction; the relationship between communication and cognition; the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse; the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing; and the role of empirical work in CL research. This feature of the book endows it with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the sections and the contributions therein. (Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and Sandra Peña Cervel)