The study is concerned with fundamental aspects of figurative speech. The methodology underlying the approach is a concept of communicative grammar which has found its way into linguistics via language-analytic philosophy. Proceeding from an intensive discussion of traditional concepts and theorems, the study sets out to inquire into the way the formation and understanding of metaphors can be adequately described against the background of a pragmatic model. On the basis of a large corpus of newspaper texts, an example taken from the discourse on multi-media is drawn upon to show how a metaphor is introduced into language usage and the conditions under which repeated use can lead to habitualization and ultimately to conventionalization of a metaphorical expression.