Introduction

Abstract

The editorial board hopes with this special issue on metaphor to illustrate some tendencies in current metaphor research. In our ‘Call for papers’ we had originally signalled that we wanted contributions dealing with both linguistic and literary approaches. In the end we received only one paper on literary discourse (Enrico Monti). It is obvious that cognitive semantics and conceptual metaphor theory have first of all attracted linguists although cognitive-metaphoric analyses applied to literature are not difficult to find.1 Metaphor has become a major aspect of the study of language and thought with the result that the nature of metaphor and the use of metaphor in different types of discourse are being investigated from a number of perspectives.