Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Angeliki Athanasiadou and Prof. Herbert L. Colston for offering me an opportunity to publish this volume in their series Figurative Thought and Language. My sincere thanks are due to all the contributors, many of whom have also acted as internal reviewers, reading and commenting on the first drafts of chapters written by other authors. I am very grateful to two external anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks and suggestions on the content of all the chapters. I would also like to thank Esther Roth (Acquisition Editor), Ineke Elskamp, and the whole team at John Benjamins for their generous help with handling the production process of the volume.