The 2008 Stockholm Metaphor Festival attracted some 30 participants from 15 countries throughout the world: Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the USA. The ten papers included in this volume consist of the two keynote lectures and eight out of the 19 session papers. From the outset, the Metaphor Festival has welcomed contributions discussing metaphor and metonymy as well as other types of figurative language within different theoretical frameworks and with literary as well as linguistic approaches. The papers included in this collection reflect some of the breadth of the presentations at the 2008 Festival. Of the two keynote speakers, Antonio Barcelona presents an anatomy of metonymy at all linguistic levels, from phonology to discourse, while Gerard Steen explores the conditions required for the use of metaphor to be considered deliberate (as opposed to conventional, automatic and unconscious). In the remaining contributions, A’Beckett studies an extended metaphor running through a Tom Sharpe novel, Alm-Arvius explores iconicity and poeticity in the discourse functions of schemes and tropes, Eizaga Rebollar discusses the representation and storage of conceptual information underlying idioms as well as the retrieval and use of idioms in communication, Hsieh and Kolodkina present expressions for hands and eyes as metaphors for emotion in Chinese, Russian and English, Kryvenko investigates animal metaphors in Ukrainian and English sports terminology, Roldán-Riejos charts the role of medical metaphors in engineering discourse, Taiwo traces the use of metaphorical expressions in Nigerian political discourse, and Twardzicz provides a scrutiny of metaphors in commercial contracts.