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The book deals with a number of questions such as: To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society? Can the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor simultaneously explain universality and diversity in metaphorical thought? Cognitive linguists have done important work on universal aspects of metaphor, but they have paid less attention to why metaphors vary both interculturally and intraculturally as extensively as they do. This book proposes a new theory of metaphor variation. Firstly, the major dimensions of metaphor variation are identified ; that is, those social and cultural boundaries that signal discontinuities in human experience. Secondly, the book describes which components, or aspects, of conceptual metaphor are involved in metaphor variation, and how they are involved. Thirdly, it isolates the main causes of metaphor variation. Lastly, it deals with the issue of the degree of cultural coherence in the interplay among conceptual metaphors, embodiment, and causes of metaphor variation.

The notion of 'language' is not a primary concept. There do not appear to be many languages, possibly not even a single language, that has a word exclusively reserved to denote 'language'. the notion of 'language' always seems to be historically or synchronically derived from more basic senses. These earlier or basic senses metonymically relate to speech organs such as the tongue, aspects of linguistic action such as speaking and basic linguistic units such as the word. All these elements form part of a "language frame". This paper assumes that the metonymic vehicles reflect a folk model of language. Like the expert model of language, the folk model comprises different levels. It includes, in particular, the levels of (i) phonetics, focusing on articulation and speech organs, (ii) speech (i.e. parole), focusing on various aspects of linguistic action, and (iii) language (i.e. langue), focusing on selected linguistic units. These folk-linguistic levels interact in such a way that one can metonymically shift from the level of phonetics to that of speech and from the level of speech to that of language, or, by skipping the level of speech, immediately from the level of phonetics to that of language. These metonymic shifts form a motivated, unidirectional chain, i.e. the reverse direction is hardly possible.

In his discussion of background as one aspect of construal, Langacker (2000: 208) stresses that metaphor can be seen as one type of linguistic manifestation of background, “ [… ] where the source domain serves as a background for structuring and understanding the target domain.” It is our aim in this paper to demonstrate that conceptual metonymy (often interacting with metaphor) has a similar role in providing such alternate construals. The empirical basis of the investigation will be some English, German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian verbal idioms and collocations (exemplified in (1-3)) that – when taken literally – focus on different phases of an event or on different subevents of a macroevent but are, due to the conceptual metonymy of the type PART-OF-A-SCENARIO-FOR-THE-WHOLE-SCENARIO (cf. Lakoff 1987, and Thornburg/Panther 1997), conventionalized ways of coding the whole event or macroevent (cf. Talmy 1991) and thus make possible different ways of construal. (1) pack one’ s bags (2) roll up one’ s sleeves (3) throw up the sponge Our study is intended to establish preferences in profiling certain phases of a complex event, i.e. which part (the initial, central or final part) of macroevents is most likely to get profiled in cross-linguistic terms.

In his discussion of background as one aspect of construal, Langacker (2000: 208) stresses that metaphor can be seen as one type of linguistic manifestation of background, "[...] where the source domain serves as a background for structuring and understanding the target domain". It is our aim in this paper to demonstrate that conceptual metonymy (often interacting with metaphor) has a similar role in providing such alternate construals. The empirical basis of the investigation will be some English, German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian verbal idioms and collocations (exemplified in (1-3)) that - when taken literally - focus on different phases of an event or on different subevents of a macroevent but are, due to the conceptual metonymy of the type PART-OF-A-SCENARIO-FOR-THE-WHOLE-SCENARIO (cf. Lakoff 1987, and Thornburg/Panther 1997), conventionalized ways of coding the whole event or macroevent (cf. Talmy 1991) and thus make possible different ways of construal. (1) pack one's bags (2) roll up one's sleeves (3) throw up the sponge Our study is intended to establish preferences in profiling certain phases of a complex event, i.e. which part (the initial, central or final part) of macroevents is most likely to get profiled in cross-linguistic terms.