This comprehensive examination of metonymy and pragmatic inferencing covers such topics as the place of metonymy in cognition; metonymic inferencing and grammatical structure; and metonymic inferencing across languages.

1. List of contributors; 2. Acknowledgments; 3. Introduction: On the nature of conceptual metonymy (by Panther, Klaus-Uwe); 4. Part I. The place of metonymy in cognition and pragmatics; 5. Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication (by Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, Francisco Jose); 6. Metonymy and conceptual blending (by Coulson, Seana); 7. The case for a metonymic basis of pragmatic inferencing: Evidence from jokes and funny anecdotes (by Barcelona, Antonio); 8. Part II. Metonymic inferencing and grammatical structure; 9. A construction-based approach to indirect speech acts (by Stefanowitsch, Anatol); 10. Metonymies as natural inference and activation schemas: The case of dependent clauses as independent speech acts (by Panther, Klaus-Uwe); 11. Metonymic pathways to neuter-gender human nominals in German (by Kopcke, Klaus-Michael); 12. Part III. Metonymic inferencing and linguistic change; 13. The development of counterfactual implicatures in English: A case of metonymy or M-inference? (by Ziegeler, Debra); 14. Metonymy and pragmatic inference in the functional reanalysis of grammatical morphemes in Japanese (by Okamoto, Shigeko); 15. Part IV. Metonymic inferencing across languages; 16. Metonymic construals of shopping requests in have- and be-languages (by Radden, Gunter); 17. Metonymic coding of linguistic action in English, Croatian and Hungarian (by Brdar, Mario); 18. Name index; 19. Metonymy and metaphor index; 20. Subject index