My main research area is the study of metaphor and metonymy at the interface of language, cognition and culture relying on a cognitive-functional theoretical model applied to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. I focus predominantly on contrasting the figurative language use in Hungarian, English and German, but very often other languages are also taken into consideration, with the aim of exploring the universal and language-specific and/or culture-specific aspects of metaphor and metonymy in greater detail. My attention is directed towards the role of metaphor and metonymy in motivating various linguistic phenomena, such as lexical polysemy, word-formation, morphological and syntactic constructions and framing of discourse as well.