The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse. It demonstrates that the technical apparatus of cognitive linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume pursues is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.