Converging evidence for the notions of subscene and primary scene

The general question that forms the background to this paper is one that has interested many scholars over the years, including linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and others. This question concerns the role of our experiences in motivating features of language. A number of influential studies have proposed that certain categories of experiences—or their cognitive representations—are particularly significant in accounting for facts of language use and structure. Examples of these proposed ways of parsing experience into significant divisions include experiential domains, which play a central role in the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and associates (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Sweetser 1990, Johnson 1987, Lakoff 1987, 1993, Turner 1991, etc.), prototypical events, discussed in Slobin’s 1985 study of the acquisition of grammatical categories, and Fillmore’s (1968, 1982) case frames and semantic frames, which are important elements in several current theories of semantic representation. Each of these proposed constructs parses experience in ways which are relevant to language. In this paper we consider two types of linguistic evidence for a pair of additional constructs of this general sort. By looking at facts about metaphorical language and about children’s acquisition of grammatical constructions, we hope to show that our two proposed units of experience, which we call subscene and primary scene, respectively, play a significant role in explaining aspects of linguistic and conceptual structure. We begin by considering some aspects of metaphorical data.