This lively, comprehensive and practical book offers a new, integrated and linguistically sound understanding of what figurative language is.

Barbara Dancygier is Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.

1. Introduction; 2. The basics of metaphor; 3. Metaphoric structure: levels and relations; 4. Mental spaces and blending; 5. Metonymy; 6. Grammatical constructions and figurative meaning; 7. The cross-linguistic study of metaphor; 8. Figurative language in discourse; 9. Concluding remarks.