Language, Figurative Thought, and Cross-Cultural Comparison Zoltán Kövecses School of English and American Studies Eötvös Loränd University The articles in this special issue shed refreshing new light on a number of issues in the cross-cultural study of metaphor and its use in teaching and learning foreign languages. The theory of conceptual metaphor is emerging in this volume as a new tool that is capable of providing serious assistance to both teachers and students of these languages. Yet, the main attraction of the articles, at least for me, is that in ad- dition to giving us this new tool, the articles point to new directions in the cross-cultural study of metaphor. Boers (this issue) put together a set of exciting ar- ticles that will, I believe, stimulate a great deal of future research both in applied and cognitive linguistics, or as some scholars would call this fledgling field, “ap- plied cognitive linguistics” (Pütz, Niemeier, & Dirven, 2001). Low (this issue) discusses one of the most basic issues: How do we go from metaphorical expressions to conceptual metaphors? This is an especially pertinent question in light of the many mistaken metaphor analyses in the literature. As Low shows, it is not easy to arrive at conceptual metaphors, and explicit guidelines are needed to help applied linguists who see a potential in the theory of conceptual metaphor for the purposes of language teaching. The cognitive linguistic view of metaphor is a complex theory. In this view, metaphor is seen as being constituted by a variety of parts, or components, that in- teract with each other. These include the following: (1) Experiential basis (2) Source domain (3) Target domain METAPHOR AND SYMBOL, 18(4), 311–320 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Requests for reprints should be sent to Zoltán Kövecses , School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loränd University, Ajtösi Dürer sor 19–21, H–1146 Budapest, Hungary. E-mail: zkovecses@ ludens.elte.hu