ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the phenomenon of construal and underlines its significance in language. In Cognitive Linguistics, the use of a linguistic item is governed by the particular construal imposed on its content relative to the communicative needs of the discourse. Construal refers to the mental ability of a speaker to conceptualize a situation in alternate ways. Making use of the lexical resources provided by language, the speaker can map the conceptualizations into different linguistic realizations. Each linguistic realization describes the same content but does so in a peculiar way. The aim is to show that no two expressions are synonymous even if they share the same conceptual content. They differ in terms of the type of construal or dimension of construal which the speaker employs to describe their common content. Each construal or dimension of construal represents a distinct meaning, namely each expression imposes a particular image on the content it describes.
