The aim of this study is to discover basic principles underlying linguistic figurativeness and to develop a theory that is capable of capturing conventional figurative language (referred to as CFLT, i.e. Conventional Figurative Language Theory). The rich empirical data analysed for this publication include, among other things, idioms, proverbs, lexicalised metaphors, and figurative compounds, drawn from ten standard languages with widely different genetic relationships and/or cultural backgrounds (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Russian, Lithuanian, Greek, Finnish, Japanese) and one...