Based on a systematic analysis of a very large corpus, this book introduces a conceptual and terminological framework for the linguistic description of abstract nouns. The uses and meanings of 670 abstract English nouns are described and their semantic, pragmatic, rhetorical, textual and cognitive functions are discussed, always with reference to authentic corpus data. This way a link between the corpus method and functional and cognitive theories of language is established. The book includes an appendix giving statistical information on the lexico-grammatical usage of the 670 nouns.