This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. * Provides definitions of major concepts * Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity * Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres * Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language * Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data