Exploring the cognitive motivation of figurativity

The chapter foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativity in meaning construction, emphasise the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and illustrate the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives such as language variation and cultural models, discourse acts, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of empirical work in Cognitive Linguistics, the import of cognitive operations in the language of emotions, the relations holding between multimodality and cognitive modelling.