In this paper we propose that in order to understand the motivations for certain linguistic patterns it is useful to parse experience into two new units, which we call subscenes and primary scenes. Certain facts about metaphorical language and about children's acquisition of grammatical constructions are most plausibly accounted for by appealing to units of experience (subscenes) that are much narrower than such familiar ones as domains - e.g. the perception of heaviness or straightness, the experience of hunger or of satisfaction, etc. Recurring, tight correlations between such fundamental, self-contained dimensions of subjective experience (i.e. primary scenes) give rise to primary metaphors. (While the correlation between literal elements of a scenario may underlie a metonymic conceptual relationship, truly metaphoric patterns of conceptual association may also result from such correlations.) And under some conditions children misinterpret linguistic signs as references to subscenes, presumably because they lack access to more complex representations . (Joseph Grady and Christopher Johnson)