This chapter offers an overview of the essentials of the cognitive-functional view adopted in the book, and situates the approach in the wider field of language studies, notably relative to the cognitive linguistic and functional linguistic traditions. It also introduces the general theoretical issues of concern in the book: it highlights the importance in language research of an active concern with conceptualization, and of assuming a dynamic relationship between conceptual and linguistic structures and processes (i.e. between meaning and form), and it points out the different practices in this regards in the strands of cognitive and functional linguistics. Finally, it presents the rudiments of a model called Functional Procedural Grammar, which serves as guide and blackboard throughout the book, and which is elaborated further in the course of it.