This chapter addresses the role of figurative thought at the level of discourse and investigates the metonymic grounding of interpersonal communication. With the focus placed upon illocutionary constructions realized through the interrogative sentence type, it aims to delineate the way in which conceptual metonymy contributes to moulding indirect illocutions. The research is conducted under the umbrella of the 'Cost Benefit Cognitive Model', which conceives of illocutions as entrenched, productive and replicable form-function pairings. The qualitative analysis of attested corpus data retrieved from the BNC, the COCA, and the WebCorp provides a depiction of the variety and complexity of some constructional procedures along with the socio-cultural variables licensing them, and it prompts the proposal of a 'Thinking-for Metonymic-Speaking' (TFMS) process that motivates illocutionary indirectness
