Instructional Strategies

By Mindy J. Oppenheim, M.Ed.

(Article Published by TRN InfoLine, May 1999)

Facilitating valued, meaningful employment for people with severe learning challenges was the original intention of supported employment. Although we’ve made great strides, in many areas people with severe challenges are still excluded from valued employment and community living opportunities. To realize our original intention, supported employment professionals are challenged to look to other fields of study for ideas, strategies and techniques that will help us in the areas of assessment, job matching and instructional programming, and teaching.

I began my sojourn into supported employment 16 years ago armed and dangerous with a degree in psychology and a thorough understanding of behaviorism. Manipulation and control of behavior was (and still is in many places) the main technique used to teach people behaviors, skills, and attitudes.

Over the years my instructional “bag of tricks” has expanded ten-fold. Innovations from the fields of psychology, instructional design, computer assisted learning, whole-brain research and neurolinguistics has forever changed the way I view intelligence, instructional design and teaching.

As we become better trainers, people with learning challenges will have greater access to valued jobs and community life. Innovations in learning and teaching techniques can provide us with options when we’ve reached road blocks. Statements such as “this person has gone as far as they can go,” or “this person can’t learn anything new,” begs the questions - “Is there anyone that can teach this person the skill or behavior? I wonder what they would do differently?”

At the foundation for a new way of thinking about teaching and learning is our basic belief about intelligence. In our culture we measure intelligence with an IQ test. The prototype for this test was originally developed by psychologist Alfred Binet in 1904 to predict how French kids would do in French schools. Dr. Binet’s wish was that this test would never be used to measure intelligence.

Dr. Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, states that the traditional concept of intelligence is defined operationally as the ability to answer linguistic and logical/mathematical items on tests of intelligence. Dr. Gardner contends that students receiving Cs, Ds, and Fs have fallen through the cracks because teachers are using teaching strategies geared for linguistic and mathematical learners.

In our culture we use the term retardation for people having problems primarily with linguistic and logical problem solving (a result of doing poorly on the IQ test). A person’s IQ is likely to have significant effect upon their future. IQ has an influence on teacher expectations and in determining eligibility and certain privileges.

Can you envision a culture where people are evaluated for their musical or painting skills? Tone-deaf or color-blind people would be considered retarded in those settings.

As societies change, so do evaluations of skills. Before books were widely available, would we value massive feats of rote linguistic memory? Perhaps, if computers assume (or consume) most of our linguistic and mathematical operations, our own society may evolve into one where artistic skills are the most highly valued!

In 1983, Dr. Gardner introduced the Theory of Multiple Intelligence (MI). MI theory changes the way we look at intelligence. In his landmark book Frames of Mind, Gardner defines intelligence as the ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued and of consequence in a particular cultural setting or community. He views intelligence as raw biological potential and believes that individuals may differ in the intelligence profiles with which they are born, and consequently, that they end up with.

Gardener identifies seven types of intelligence, five more than our current system accommodates. The seven intelligence’s include:

Linguistic Intelligence (Word Smart): The capacity to use words effectively, whether orally or in writing. Includes the ability to manipulate the syntax or structure of language, the phonology or sounds of language, the semantics or meanings, and the pragmatic dimensions or practical uses of language. Poetry is a very high form of linguistic intelligence.

Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (Logic/Number smart): The capacity to use numbers effectively and reason well. Includes sensitivity to logical patterns and relationships, statements and propositions (if-then, cause-effect) functions, and other related abstractions.

Spatial Intelligence (Picture Smart): The ability to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately and to perform transformations upon those perceptions. Involves sensitivity to color, line, shape, form, space and the relationships that exist between these elements.

Musical Intelligence (Music Smart): Capacity to perceive, discriminate, transform and express musical forms. Includes sensitivity to the rhythm, pitch or melody. One can have a global, intuitive understanding of music or a formal or analytic/technical understanding.

Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (Body Smart): Expertise in using one’s whole body to express ideas and feelings and facility in using one’s hands to produce or transform things. Includes specific physical skills such as coordination, balance, dexterity, strength, flexibility, and speed.

Interpersonal Intelligence (People Smart): The ability to perceive and make distinctions in the moods, intentions, motivations, and feelings of other people. May include sensitivity to facial expressions, voice, and gestures; the capacity for discriminating among many different kinds of interpersonal cues; and the ability to respond effectively to those cues in some pragmatic way.

Intrapersonal Intelligence (Self Smart): Self-knowledge and the ability to act adaptively on the basis of that knowledge. This intelligence includes having an accurate picture of oneself (one’s strengths and limitations); awareness of inner moods, intentions, motivations, temperaments, and desires; and the capacity for self-discipline, self-understanding, and self-esteem.

Applying the Theory of MI to Assessment and Job Matching

The theory of MI has implications in the assessment, placement and training phases of supported employment. MI gives us a framework to operate within, and clues us to when we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Example: A job coach asked me to help him develop a behavioral plan. He was very frustrated trying to teach Mary (not her real name) how to clean rooms at a local hotel. Mary’s problems included tardiness, slow pace, and overall lack of motivation. I asked the job coach to tell me a little bit about Mary. “She loves people,” he said. I responded: “…and she’s stuck inside a hotel room with you all day.” Working in a hotel room did not take into account Mary’s basic intelligence and love for people. Bad job match…Next.

Developing Instructional Interventions

As a teacher, you’ve probably noticed that you are very effective with certain types of learners and not as effective with others. Is your teaching style flexible and based on each learners individual style, or do you use the same techniques with everyone? What if a learner is spatially smart and visually oriented and the instructor is logical-mathematical. What if a learner requires structure (logical-mathematical) and the instructor is primarily visual and unstructured. These types of mixes and matches happen all of the time.

The theory of MI provides only one piece of a larger puzzle in developing instructional interventions. Two other important pieces to take into consideration are instructional setting and an individual’s communication preference.

Instructional setting may be critical to an overall instructional program. One scale to consider evaluates a person’s individual preferences in relation to learning in independent, dependent and/or collaborative settings.

Independent learners prefer to work alone. They require flexibility and freedom and prefer an active role in developing their own educational goals and strategies. The teacher is considered an expert and resource person. One supported employee was on the brink of being fired for attitude and behavior problems when her job coach gave her the task analysis tool where she kept track of her own performance. She is still employed and feels ownership and pride at her job!

Collaborative learners require participation and interaction and probably don’t like working or learning alone. Techniques such as listening to tapes or working in workbooks may not be the best approach. The collaborative learner prefers to work in groups, be around people, and possibly process orally.

Dependent learners require structured settings. To the dependent learner the teacher is responsible for the learning. If the person doesn’t learn, it is the teacher’s fault. Dependent learners may fair well with logical-mathematically oriented teachers where the objectives are clear and learning experiences structured.

One last important piece of information needed to develop an individualized instructional program is to consider a person’s communication preferences, i.e., auditory, visual and kinesthetic. The field of Neurolinguistics (NLP) professes that every person has a preferred orientation in the way we: 1) take in information, 2) process information, and 3) express information. For example, when receiving information, one person may first make a picture in their mind, then say something to themselves, and finally check it with their feelings. Another person’s process may include a gut reaction first, a comment, and then a picture.

One way to determine an individual’s communication style is to listen for the predicates that they use to describe their world. The phrases “I see what you mean,” “I hear what you’re saying,” and “It feels right to me,” may all be expressing the same idea, but each of these people are “wired” completely differently.

Another way to determine an individual’s communication style is to watch their eyes move when they are talking and thinking. Generally, visual information is accessed straight ahead or up and to the left (for memory) or right (for thinking). Auditory people tend to shift their eyes from ear to ear, (left for memory and/or right for thinking). When someone is accessing kinesthetic information (feelings), they tend to look down and to the right. Sometimes we think these people aren’t listening because they’re not looking us visual people in the eyes.

The observation skills required to establish rapport and determine individual styles and preferences are useful in all aspects of our personal and professional lives. These skills are being taught to business and sales professionals, stock brokers, counselors, therapists and other’s whose job depends on the ability to communicate, teach, and build rapport.

Once we’ve determined a person’s learning preferences and the most effective methods of teaching them, it is important to: 1) help the learner talk about their own learning and communication needs; 2) communicate the information to others who will be working with the individual; 3) reflect the information in our instructional program and task analysis.

Each task analysis is different with the steps incorporating cues and prompts specific to an individual, even if you are teaching the same skill to five people. For example, in teaching how to use a copy machine, an auditory learner’s cue may be, “When you hear the thing-a-ma-jiggi stop, lift the cover.” For a visual learner, “When the light goes off, lift the cover,” and for a kinesthetic learner, “When the machine stops shaking, lift the cover.”

In summary, it’s critical that supported employment professionals move beyond manipulation and control of behavior and develop innovative and creative teaching strategies to help people realize their true potential. In the process, who knows, we may just discover our own potential! Imagine the possibilities.

Mindy Oppenheim, M.Ed., provides training and instructional design services to job coaches, job developers, special education/transition and human resources personnel nationally. She is a certified NLP Practitioner. For more information please call (415) 345-1780, fax (415) 345-1781 or E-Mail SETraining@yahoo.com.

(reply to Chiappe & Kukla)

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson

Abstract: Chiappe and Kukla argue that relevance theory fails to solve the frame problem as defined by Fodor. They are right. They are wrong, however, to take Fodor’s frame problem too seriously. Fodor’s concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that Relevance thoery helps address them.

The AI “frame problem” (McCarthy & Hayes 1969) has been reinterpreted in a variety of ways (Pylyshyn 1987). Fodor’s is the loosest and grandest reinterpretation of all (Fodor 1987). The “frame problem”, he writes, is: “Hamlet’s problem: when to stop thinking” (p.140); the problem of formalizing the distinction between “kooky facts” and “computationally relevant ones” (p.145); “just the problem of nondemonstrative inference” (p.146); “the problem of formalizing our intuitions about inductive relevance” (p.148). Fodor concludes that “the frame problem is too important to leave it to the hackers” (p.148), and Hayes retorts that “Fodor doesn’t know the frame problem from a bunch of bananas” (Hayes 1987: 132).

Undeterred, Chiappe and Kukla adopt Fodor’s interpretation of the problem, and argue that we have not solved it. They are right, of course. Did we ever claim to have solved Fodor’s frame problem? Should we have done so? Is it so clear that Fodor’s problem is well posed in the first place? What we did claim is that Relevance Theory, and the study of verbal comprehension in particular, could help better understand central thought processes. A mere ray of sunshine, obviously not enough to do away with “the pallor of Fodorian gloom.”

Fodor seems to know exactly what it takes to be rational, and Chiappe and Kukla seem to have understood him. We don’t and we haven’t. Fodor argues that “modular cognitive processing is ipso facto irrational” in that it arrives at conclusions “by attending to less than all the evidence that is relevant and available” (Fodor 1987: 139-140). By contrast, unencapsulated, central processes of belief fixation are rational, he argues, in that they make use of all the relevant and available evidence. The question then seems to be: how do central processes avoid getting bogged down with all the irrelevant available evidence?

This is all very puzzling. Is it really the case that central processes of belief fixation actually use all the relevant and available evidence? Wouldn’t that be enough to bog them down? You have invited Granny for dinner and you wonder what main course would most please her. Osso bucco, you decide, remembering that she likes Italian food, raves about the Capri restaurant whose specialty is osso bucco, and has complained that you always serve her kedgeree. Reasonable enough, but don’t you have, after all these years, much more evidence of Granny’s likes and dislikes? Didn’t she, for instance, once say that you couldn’t find good veal any more? And yet here you are, processing the veal shanks, and not all these further bits of relevant information. The truth of the matter is that central processes consider some of the available relevant evidence, never all of it.

If it were crucial to rational belief fixation to consider all the available relevant evidence, why shouldn’t evidence available in the environment ( for instance in libraries, or in other people’s memories) be exploited too?, Given Fodor’s criterion of rational belief fixation, why should the way in which you access the relevant evidence–by remembering or by consulting–matter to whether rationality demands its use? Actually, we often do consider some of the environmentally relevant information (you did check with Grandpa that Granny had not had veal this week, didn’t you?), but never all of it.

By Fodor’s criterion of rationality, since we fail to consider all the relevant evidence, we are, in any case, irrational. Come to think of it, would you want to be rational in his sense? Do you want to consider all the (internally and externally) available evidence every time you fix a belief–which still would not guarantee that all your beliefs would be true, but would guarantee that you would fix much fewer of them? Fodor’s rationality is a purely epistemic matter: the only utility is truth, and no price is too high to pay to increase the chances that your beliefs are true. Fodor’s frame problem is: how do we manage to pay the exorbitant price of such rationality? The short answer is that we don’t.

A kind of rationality worth having is one based on sound accounting principles, where not only benefits, but also costs are weighed. This, incidentally, is also the only kind of rationality that is at all likely to be found in evolved wetware like us. To be rational in this sense is to maximize the expected cognitive utility of the information one attends to, be it information picked from the environment or information retrieved from memory.

We use “relevance” as a theoretical term to refer to the cognitive utility of a piece of information in a context, or for an individual at a given time (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1987). Relevance so understood has two aspects, cognitive effect–the benefit–and processing effort–the cost. The cognitive effect, if any, of processing a piece of information is to allow fixation or revision of beliefs. Effort is a matter of greater or lesser mobilization of brain resources in order to achieve this effect. Ceteris paribus, the greater the effect of processing a given piece of information, the greater its relevance. Ceteris paribus, the greater the effort involved in processing a given piece of information, the lower its relevance.

Here is a toy illustration. You have bought a ticket for a lottery and you know the prizes are $10, $500, and $1000. Suppose you are informed of one of three things:

(a) You have won $500.

(b) You have won $10, $500, or $1000.

(c) Either you have not won $500, or the square root of 2207 is not 49, but not both.

Information (a) is more relevant than information (b) because (a) implies (b) and therefore has all the effects of (b) plus some of its own, without greater cost in effort. Information (a) is also more relevant than information (c), although (a) and (c) are logically equivalent and therefore carry exactly the same effects. However, in the case of (c), achieving these effects involves greater effort. This may not correspond to your favorite meaning for the vague English word “relevance.” If so, we would want to argue that either relevance in your sense plays no distinct role in cognitive processes, or else relevance in your sense is a special case of our more general theoretical notion.

At any given moment in one’s cognitive life, there is a wide range of new information being monitored in the environment, and there is an even wider range of information in memory, bits of which might be activated and would provide a context in which to process the information from the environment (or other pieces of information from memory). Only some of the possible combinations of new and contextual information would yield relevance, and this to a greater or lesser degree. There is no way for the mind to review all possible combinations of new and contextual information in order to find out which would maximize relevance. Even if there was a way, the effort involved in such a review would so lower the overall cognitive utility of the process as to defeat the whole enterprise. So how should the mind proceed? Since it cannot have foreknowledge of relevance, how can the mind have, at least, non-arbitrary expectations of relevance?

To begin with, when expectations of effect are wholly indeterminate, the mind should base itself on considerations of effort: pick up from the environment the most easily attended stimulus, and process it in the context of what comes most readily to mind. Ceteris paribus, what is easier is more relevant, if it is relevant at all. But what are the chances that what comes more easily to mind is, in fact, relevant? They would be close to nil, if saliency in the environment and accessibility in memory were both random, and moreover uncorrelated. But humans are evolved organisms with learning capacities of sorts, so it is not too surprising to find that they spontaneously pay more attention to moving objects than to still objects, to looming objects than to receding objects, to sudden noises than to constant noises, to other people’s faces than to other people’s feet, to their own children than to others’ etc. i.e. to objects and events that, on average, are more likely to be relevant to them.

For the same reason, it is not surprising that the perceptual categorization of a distal stimulus should tend to activate related information in memory. Thus having your attention attracted by a snake tends to make your beliefs about snakes, at that moment, more accessible than your beliefs about the frame problem. Nor is it surprising that memory is so organized that pieces of information that are likely to be simultaneously relevant tend to be co-accessed or co-activated in chunks variously described in the literature as “concepts” “schemas,” “scripts,” “dossiers,” etc.

Chiappe and Kukla might want to follow Fodor and argue that such suggestions are a way to beg, rather than to begin answering the question. Consider the concept of a fridgeon: “x is a fridgeon at t iff x is a particle at t and [Fodor's] fridge is on at t” (Fodor 1987: 144). Were you to learn that Fodor’s fridge has just been turned on, you could infer of every particle in the Universe that it is now a fridgeon. How is that for cognitive effect! How come, then, that we don’t have such kooky concepts, and don’t keep inferring such kooky facts? Because, contrary to appearances, such cognitive effect is of the weakest kind. Once you have inferred that a given particle is a fridgeon, or that all particles are fridgeons, nothing further follows. Such dead-end inferences are not worth the effort. Compare with inferring that some food is refrigerated: from this you can infer that it will keep longer, that it will taste different, and these facts in turn have further consequences. Why the difference? Because we have a “theory” of refrigeration, not one of fridgeonization. Relevance considerations will favor concepts with rich inferential potential, typically concepts embodying some kind of causal theory. But why couldn’t we have inferentially rich kooky concepts? We can and we do: astrology is an example. However the biological function of cognition is served mostly through roughly true theories that give the organism some control over specific aspects of its environment (there is a much longer story to be told here: see Sperber 1994; Tooby & Cosmides 1992).

Chiappe and Kukla object to our claim that memory is organized in chunks, as if it were some controversial posit of ours, and not the most common presupposition of all the memory literature. They also object that, since we don’t say much about what goes in a given chunk, we leave open the possibility of tailoring particular chunks so as to confirm–vacuously–our relevance-based predictions. They are quite right: we don’t have a theory of memory of our own, nor do we claim to have one. Our concern has been, rather, to develop an account of some cognitive processes that relates in a mutually beneficial way with what is known, or will be discovered, about the organization of human memory. In general, relevance theory predicts that memory will tend (both from a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic point of view) to be organized in a relevance-boosting manner. Relevance-theoretic analyses of particular cognitive process, say of the retrieval of implicatures from a given utterance, imply that some particular pieces of information are chunked and tend to be activated together, thus making the analysis vulnerable to experimental techniques (e.g. priming) used in memory and categorization research.

Assuming independently motivated and testable assumptions about attention and memory, we argue that relevant evidence is likely to be found by following a path of least effort. Minimizing effort, then, is not just reasonable thrift, it is an epistemically sound strategy.

But once on the path of least effort, how far should you go? Fodor’s Hamlet problem, “When to stop thinking?”, would have no general answer if you had a single, open-ended thought process active in your mind (e.g. comparing the merits of being vs. not being). Unlike Fodor’s Hamlet, however, humans have in mind, at any given time, several active or near-active conceptual processes competing for cognitive resources. In such conditions, Fodor’s Hamlet problem has a simple in-principle answer. Let the processes with greater expected relevance win. But, of course, this time, we want expectations of effect to be a determinant factor, for least effort by itself would end up favoring no effort at all.

We assume that cognitive processes proceed in a way that is sensitive to the level of effect they achieve, and to the level of effort they expend (just as bodily movement proceed in a way that is sensitive to the effect achieved and to muscular effort expended). This does not mean that the mind computes representations of effect and effort, let alone absolute values. All that might be involved is a sensitivity to marginal changes in levels of effect and effort and, for instance, an automatic increase of effort for processes where effect is on the increase, and, after an initial grace period, a decrease of effort or a deactivation for processes where effect is on the decrease, or is nil. Of course, automatic allocation of cognitive resources based on such a very rough implicit evaluation of expected relevance would allow many unproductive processes to carry on for too long, and would terminate too early some processes with great hidden potential. Your chances of ever making a true scientific discovery would be extremely slim. Well, actually, they are.

Relevance theory makes claims about cognition in general, and about communication in particular. Chiappe and Kukla show no understanding of our claims about communication. Communication, we argue, raises and exploits definite expectations of relevance. Whereas individual spontaneous cognitive activity aims at maximal relevance and may have no better way of doing so than a form of blind hill climbing (feel the terrain, choose a path that goes up but is not too rough), comprehension aims at a specific level of relevance indicated by the act of communication itself. (How? Read Relevance.)

Fodor asks: “what is a nonarbitrary strategy for delimiting the evidence that should be searched in rational belief fixation?” (Fodor 1987:140). We have just hinted at how to answer this question: a nonarbitrary strategy available to cognitively endowed evolved organisms consists in trying to maximize the expected effect/effort ratio. This will be effective even if the organism has nothing better to base its choices on than a sensitivity to immediate increments and decrements in levels of effect and effort. Of course, such an organism would not be rational in Fodor’s sense, but, we claim, no individual organism ever is. Enduring collective cognitive enterprises, where, through communication, relevance can be better targeted, may begin to display shades of the kind of rationality that Fodor attributes to individual human cognition. Scientific thinking is a case in point. The chances of an isolated individual cognizer making a true scientific discovery are not slim, they are nonexistent. So are the chances of understanding the cognitive basis of scientific achievements without understanding the more modest cognitive feat that each of us performs thousand times every day of understanding what someone else is saying.

References

Fodor, J.A. (1987). Modules, frames, fridgeons, sleeping dogs and the music of the spheres. In The robot’s dilemma: The frame problem in artificial intelligence. ed. Z. Pylyshyn. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Hayes, P.J. (1987). What the frame problem is and isn’t. In The robot’s dilemma: The frame problem in artificial intelligence. Ed. Z. Pylyshyn. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

McCarthy, J. & Hayes, P.J. (1969). Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. In Machine intelligence 4. Eds B. Meltzer & D. Michie, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Pylyshyn, Z. (ed) (1987). The robot’s dilemma: The frame problem in artificial intelligence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (eds), Mapping the Mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1987). Precis of Relevance: Communication and cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 697-754.

Tooby, J. & Cosmides L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (eds.) The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New-York: Oxford University Press.

(In Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19:3 (1996). 530-532.)

Multiple Meanings in the Analysis of Implicit Metaphors

David Ritchie

Metaphor and Symbol, 18(2), 125-146.

Abstract

Both Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996), in their critique of Lakoff and Johnson, draw narrowly from a broad range of reasonable interpretations of the metaphors they analyze. Expanding the interpretations vitiates many of Vervaeke and Kennedy’s criticisms, but it supports their call for an open interpretation of groups of metaphors, and points toward a more complex elaboration of the theories put forth by Lakoff and his colleagues. The results of applying this approach to “ARGUMENT IS WAR” suggest that war is not necessarily the primary conceptual metaphor for contentious argument, as Lakoff and Johnson claim. Rather, there is a complex field of contentious interactions, ranging from simple discussions through contests to all-out war: Any and all of these can be and are used as metaphors for the others. When a word or phrase like “defend,” “position,” “maneuver,” or “strategy” is used, there is no a priori way to determine whether the intended underlying conceptual metaphor is war, an athletic contest, or a game of chess. Similar analyses are applied to other examples from the metaphor literature, and a modification of the basic idea of conceptual mapping is proposed, in which metaphors map cognitive responses onto prototypical situations rather than mapping one specific experience or concept onto another.

Argument is War – Or is it a Game of Chess?

Multiple Meanings in the Analysis of Implicit Metaphors

Lakoff and his colleagues (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; 1999; Lakoff & Turner, 1989) propose an account of metaphor as implicit and conceptual. They identify numerous groups or families of metaphors, each organized around a common implicit metaphor. For many of these families of metaphors they trace the underlying metaphor to a literal concept based on embodied physical experience; on this basis they claim that most conceptual reasoning is fundamentally metaphorical, in that our abstract concepts are experienced and expressed in terms of embodied physical experience.

Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) dispute some of the Lakoff group’s arguments and question whether the theory of conceptual metaphors is fundamentally falsifiable. Vervaeke and Kennedy make an important contribution in arguing for an essentially open interpretation of groups of metaphors, with a potential for indefinitely many levels of generality, each “’implicit’ in the sense of ‘waiting’ or ‘available’ or ‘apt once they are mentioned’” (1996, p. 277). However, Vervaeke and Kennedy overstate their case, since they neglect the potential for falsification through experimental research, and consider only a narrow range of reasonable extensions and interpretations of their examples; upon closer inspection these metaphors fail to support many of their claims. On the other hand, many of the metaphors produced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) as evidence of a single implicit metaphor can likewise be interpreted in multiple ways.

In this essay I develop an extended analysis of several metaphors introduced by Vervaeke and Kennedy, Lakoff and his colleagues, and others, to show that conceptual metaphors such as “ARGUMENT IS WAR” often emerge from a field of inter-related concepts, all available for metaphorical application to each other as well as to external concepts, such as business and politics. The picture that emerges from a more thorough interpretation of common metaphors is more complex than Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) original account, but I believe it preserves and extends their fundamental insights about the interpenetration of culture, thought, and language in the embodied mind.

Vervaeke and Kennedy’s critique of implicit metaphor theory

In stating as a primary objective to “defend the view that some terms are literal or standardized,” Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996, p. 273) restrict language to a dichotomy, literal or metaphorical. However, evidence suggests a continuum, ranging from expressions virtually everyone would recognize as literal (including genuinely “dead” metaphors, such as “salary” and “pedigree”) to those virtually everyone would recognize as figurative (Gibbs, 1994; Goatly, 1997; Kittay, 1987; Linzey, 1997; Radman, 1997). The orientational metaphors so important to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) analyses (“The stock market is up,” “He and his sister are very close”) are readily recognizable as metaphors, even if we do not ordinarily think of them as such (Gibbs, 1992). Their meanings have become lexicalized in the sense that we do not necessarily think of motion through space when we speak of “getting closer to a solution” or of the position of one’s body when we speak of “taking a stand,” but these meanings are not distinct in the sense that, for example, the contemporary meaning of salary has become distinct from “a monthly allotment of salt” (Gibbs, Beitel, Harrington, & Sanders, 1994).

Even a new metaphor, if it strikes the hearer or reader as particularly apt, may quickly become “lexicalized” – the “Star Wars” metaphor for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative seemed immediately apt in evoking a sense of Hollywood-originated fantasy, but after a few months the reference to the movie series of that name quickly faded from attention. By now, it is unlikely that references to a “Star Wars” defense program ordinarily evoke any more than a general sense of “fanciful, expensive, and futuristic.” However, that a novel metaphor becomes lexicalized doesn’t mean it ceases to function as a metaphor (Gibbs, 1994; Eubanks, 1999; 2000). When the context requires it, we are capable of elaborating on the reference, even if we ordinarily don’t bother (Gentner and Bowdle, 2001; Radman, 1997).

On the need for a more thorough examination of examples. Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) begin their critique of the idea that observable patterns in discourse are best explained by an underlying implicit metaphor with a group of orientational metaphors surrounding money, including “come into money,” “run out of money,” and “fall into debt.” Vervaeke and Kennedy claim that these phrases are inflexible, pointing out that it would sound peculiar to extend them as “we came out of money,” “run in money,” or “rise out of debt.” But this argument seems disingenuous: On the one hand, we do say that someone “comes from old money” or “rose out of poverty.” On the other hand, there are also constraints on how we extend literal usages: We would not say that sugar “rose out of the bowl” (cf. Keysar & Glucksberg, 1992).

Vervaeke and Kennedy’s (1996) other counter-examples are susceptible to similar critique. It is indeed impossible, as they contend, to understand both “she burns me up” and “she lights my fire” in terms of a root metaphor “ANGER IS HEAT,” but these phrases make sense in terms of the more general “PASSION IS HEAT,” as do the opposites, “cool as a cucumber,” “heart like a block of ice,” and “their marriage is an icebox” (Lakoff, 1993, makes a similar point). Granted that “she burns my fire” is ambiguous, but the literal “it burns my fire” is also awkward. Vervaeke and Kennedy’s point, that “one cannot simply group some metaphors, adduce a possible common base, and then expect derivations from the base to be apt” (1996, p. 274) is not supported by their examples, and I have not been able to think of other examples that cannot similarly be vitiated by a more careful analysis. The point that metaphors cannot be extended any which way is valid, but literal usages are subject to similar constraints (Keysar & Glucksberg, 1992). It is often surprising how far a common metaphor can be extended, with no more attention to patterns of phrase construction than is required for a literal usage.

Similarly, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) contrast inter-related systems of metaphorical expressions, such as “argument is war” and “argument is a journey” with idiosyncratic metaphorical expressions that stand alone, e.g., “the foot of a mountain,” “a table leg.” They claim that “a shoulder of the mountain” is used only by mountaineers and other specialists, and that any further extension of “mountain is a person” would be considered fanciful and literary, e.g., “the mountain had its head in the clouds.” Presumably, Lakoff and Johnson would also limit “The north face of a mountain” and “the face of a cliff” to specialists; it is a testable hypothesis, whether ordinary day hikers would recognize these phrases. Lakoff and Johnson claim that to speak of an arm, rib, thigh, or leg of a mountain would not make sense, but we do speak of an “arm” and the “spine” of a mountain range, and mountains sometimes have “hogbacks.”

Systems of metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), these idiosyncratic metaphors do not interact with other metaphors, and don’t play any central role in our conceptual system. However, further examination suggests that many of these metaphors are extensions of a more general conceptual system, in which the body provides a metaphorical basis for many physical and conceptual objects. Sometimes the metaphorical extension is via visual resemblance (“leg” of a table or chair, “finger” steaks and “finger” lakes, “eye” of a potato or a storm, “hogback” of a mountain), sometimes orientational (“foot” of a mountain or of a bed, “footnotes,” “head” of a lake, “face” of a cliff, “arm” of a bay), sometimes functional (“head” of a family or an organization, “brains” or “eyes and ears” of an organization, “rib” of a boat or a kite, “long arm of the law,” “leg” of a table or chair). There may be idiosyncratic metaphors among everyday phrases, and some everyday phrases may represent coherent families of metaphor based on singular roots or implicit metaphors, but the evidence thus far is consistent with the idea that many everyday phrases represent overlapping and interlocking systems of metaphor, affording many possible interpretations (Gentner and Bowdle, 2001; Kovecses, 1995; Radman, 1997).

Another counter-example cited by Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996, p. 274) has this same nature. “Run out of money” may be interpretable as an instance of “MONEY IS A PLACE,” but it also makes sense as a subject-object inversion of “money runs out” or of the more general “RESOURCES run OUT,” a metaphor that can be applied to many resources, including gasoline, time, energy, and patience as well as money. “I’m out of gas” can also be interpreted as a metonym for “My tank is out of gas,” an inversion of the literal statement, “All the gas is out of my tank.” “I’m out of gas,” spoken at the end of a long day, is then a metaphoric reference to the original metonymic expression. Similarly, “I’m out of money” can be interpreted as a metonym for “My wallet is out of money,” an inversion of “All the money is out of my wallet.” “His luck ran out” and the inversion, “he has run out of luck” have similar meanings, as do “his money ran out” and “he has run out of money.” The primary difference seems to be one of active agency: When one has “run out of money” one may be understood to have had more control over the situation than when one’s money has “run out.” Some people may think of an hour-glass (“the sands of time”) in connection to running out of time or money; others may think of the final trickle from a water bottle. A person in the desert whose water (literally) runs out may soon find that luck and time have also (metaphorically) “run out.”

Supporting theoretical arguments by analyzing particular metaphors. There are at least three important points here. First, it appears that groups or families of metaphors overlap and possibly interlock (Eubanks, 2000; Gibbs, 1994; Grady, 1997a; Kovecses, 1995). General personification metaphors overlap with other metaphors for mountains, journeys, and the like. Metaphors based on a container of some sort overlap with other metaphors for money or luck. Literal usages sometimes overlap with metaphorical (Gibbs, et al., 1993; Keysar, 1994; Radman, 1997): Gasoline literally runs out of the tank, water literally runs out of a leaky canteen, money can run out of a hole in one’s pocket, and the sand literally runs out of the top of an hour-glass, but time, luck, and money also figuratively “run out.” Second, it is incumbent upon metaphor analysts and theorists to consider carefully their examples (Cameron, 1999a), and to consider alternative reasonable interpretations. Third, and most important, it is incumbent upon metaphor analysts to match their level (and depth) of analysis to their rhetorical purposes. By considering only a limited a range of interpretation Lakoff and Johnson (1980) as well as Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) often seem to set up a straw man: As soon as the range of interpretation is expanded, the alleged difficulties vanish.

Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996, p. 279) provide another group of examples that illustrate the same problem, listing a set of expressions that, they claim, point toward an implicit metaphor, “PEOPLE ARE WEAPONS.” But the person in their examples can readily be understood as a metonymic reference to “THE MOUTH IS A WEAPON,” with entailments that “words are bullets,” just as debaters gather “ammunition” to “shoot down” an opponent’s arguments. Several other of Vervaeke and Kennedy’s examples also fall within “THE MOUTH IS A WEAPON,” including “Bill shot his mouth off again,” and “Shoot” (meaning “go ahead and tell me”). The wartime motto, “Loose lips sink ships,” may be an instance of the same metaphor, but it can also be taken as a metonymic reference to a sequence of actions in which chance comments are overheard by spies, etc. There is no a priori reason to prefer one reading over any other.

Consistent with one of Vervaeke and Kennedy’s (1996) primary claims, it would seem that both the level of generality at which implicit metaphors are to be identified and the family of metaphors to which a particular expression belongs are indeterminate (see also Keysar, 1994), a conclusion that is entirely consistent with Clark’s (1996) views about language use. It is no doubt true that different individuals may interpret the same expression according to different implicit metaphors, and derive different entailments (Eubanks, 2000). It does not, however, necessarily follow that the Conceptual Metaphor model is either circular or untestable. Vervaeke and Kennedy successfully demonstrate that the theory proposed by Lakoff and his colleagues cannot be refuted merely by producing other, contradictory, metaphorical expressions, but Lakoff’s theory can be and has been tested, refined, and tested again by seeking out evidence of how people actually use and interpret metaphors (Brisard, Frisson, & Sandra, 2001; Noveck, Bianco, & Castry, 2001). Metaphors can indeed have multiple and indeterminate roots, as Vervaeke and Kennedy insist, but their conclusions don’t necessarily follow: The existence of multiple roots does not cancel the considerable evidence for the role of metaphor in conceptual experience and reasoning. However, their arguments do point up the need for abandoning or at least restricting the idea of singular, unique implicit metaphors.

ARGUMENT IS WAR: Implicit metaphor or field of metaphorical meanings?

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) return repeatedly to the metaphor, “ARGUMENT IS WAR,” as an example to illustrate how metaphors structure our experience of abstract concepts and ultimately shape our behavior, in this case our communicative behavior. One of Vervaeke and Kennedy’s (1996) most telling points is that this and various other metaphors for argument can all be construed in terms of “a process undertaken in a certain order,” and that the various kinds of processes undertaken in a certain order can be equally well mapped onto each other, with no one process necessarily any more basic than the other (p. 276). Vervaeke and Kennedy overlook a key part of Lakoff and Johnson’s argument, that metaphors for abstract concepts are, ultimately, grounded in immediate physical experience – but Lakoff and Johnson’s interpretation also seems inconsistent with this fundamental principle. Let us take another look at it.

Grounding of metaphor in direct experience. Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) claim that our primary metaphorical systems are grounded first and foremost in our direct physical and social experience. All basic sensorimotor concepts are literal, and the basic experiences of dimensionality, orientation, size, etc. form a system of literal concepts, which then form the basis for metaphoric concepts. Children conflate subjective experiences with sensorimotor experiences; these links are established as neural pathways that persist as metaphor (“a big problem,” “a close friend”) long after children learn to differentiate self from world. These primary metaphors arise naturally, automatically, and unconsciously in everyday experience, then are blended into complex metaphors.

When different conceptual domains are activated at the same time, new connections are formed, leading to new inferences (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; 1999). When these inferences are supported by physical and cultural experience, they are strengthened (Cameron, 1999b; Gibbs, 1997). Thus, metaphors are widely shared both because of the commonalities of embodied experience (larger objects commonly pose greater challenges than smaller ones; the proximity of caregivers is commonly associated with gratification of needs) and because culturally prominent metaphors are reinforced in everyday conversation. Complex metaphors coalesce into systems of metaphors that serve to structure abstract concepts and provide a basis for reasoning, for drawing inferences about the target based on relationships observed in the source (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Because they are widely shared within a culture, complex metaphors provide a basis for abstract concepts such as communication (Gibbs, 1997), morality (Lakoff, 1996) and international trade (Eubanks, 2000).

Experiential grounding for metaphors of argument. Lakoff and Johnson discuss “argument is war” in several passages, and return to it repeatedly as an example of a complex conceptual metaphor. In their most elaborate discussion Lakoff and Johnson (1980, pp. 77ff.) list several relevant characteristics of argument: One participant has a position, the other participant has a different position, both positions matter inasmuch as one must surrender for the other to achieve victory, the difference of opinion becomes a conflict, both participants plan strategy and marshal their forces, attack the other’s claims and defend their own, maneuver to achieve a stronger position, occasionally retreat before a stronger argument, then attempt to counterattack, etc. Lakoff and Johnson then point out that these elements of an argument correspond to elements of the concept, “war.”

However, many of the elements on this list also correspond to elements of concepts such as “chess match,” “bridge game” (Vervaeke & Kennedy, 1996), and other competitive activities (Eubanks, 2000). Chess itself is often used as a metaphor for war (Eubanks, 2000) – and war is sometimes used as a metaphor for chess (and other games). The names of some chess pieces, in English, suggest a war metaphor (castle, knight) but names of other pieces suggest a political metaphor (bishop, queen). War is also frequently used as a metaphor for athletic competition, and for business competition – but again, the converse is also true. Most of the metaphorical expressions Lakoff and Johnson (1980) cite as evidence for an underlying metaphor, “argument is war” are also consistent with “argument is chess” or “argument is boxing.”

Given the small number of people in the U.S. who have directly experienced war, it is not easy to see how “ARGUMENT IS WAR” can be grounded in direct physical or social experience, except through media portrayals of war or by way of a chain of extensions built on more direct experience, such as “WAR IS BOXING.” On the other hand, several of the other activities within this group of inter-related concepts are grounded in direct physical and social experience, and thus are directly available for metaphorical understanding of argument – and of war. From a very early age, children engage in heated disputes that lead to verbal and occasionally to physical violence. They engage in competitive contests and games, and in contests of will with siblings, peers, parents, and other adults. Although it is dubious that children have any realistic concept of war before they reach adolescence (if then), they certainly have well-developed schemas for physical and verbal fighting, contests, and games.

Children probably acquire the warlike metaphors of their culture in the same way they acquire vocabulary for other concepts beyond their personal experience, through communication, both interpersonal and mediated. But how do children come to understand the concept of war, if not by metaphorical elaboration of their own embodied experience of interpersonal conflict? It is likely that our experience of both argument and war are grounded in the common experience of frustrated desires and the consequent conflict of wills, a sequence of events experienced by children from infancy.

In short, we need not look to organized adult warfare for an experiential basis to ground our understanding of argument; we have a rich experiential basis much closer to hand. I am not arguing that we never understand argument in terms of warfare; indeed, I suspect most of us have found ourselves in the kind of argument where one or the other antagonist is in a mood to “take no prisoners” and will settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender,” and the stakes escalate beyond ordinary competition. I am suggesting, in concurrence with Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996), that the same metaphorical expressions are used in a variety of social contexts, of which all-out war is only the most extreme. War is indeed often used as a metaphor for interpersonal argument, but argument is also sometimes used as a metaphor for war, and games are often used as a metaphor for both argument and war (see also Eubanks, 2000).

However, I do not agree with Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996, p. 276) that it necessarily follows that no process is more basic than the others. If we are to take seriously Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) proposal that abstract concepts, as well as novel physical and social experiences (such as the experience of war, to those fortunate enough never to have experienced it directly), are understood by metaphorical extension of immediate “embodied” (physical and social) experience, then the processes of interpersonal competition and conflict are more basic than the processes of either war or formal academic argument, if only in the sense that they are experienced first, and the other forms of conflict that come later are at least initially understood in terms of the earlier experiences. That does not imply, of course, that the later forms of conflict, once they have been experienced (if only vicariously, through novels, films and news reports), do not in turn provide powerful metaphors for expressing certain aspects of more routine forms of conflict, including argument.

The case for discrete types of metaphors. Grady (1997a, b; Grady, Taub, & Morgan, 1996) argue, on the basis of a reanalysis of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) discussion of THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, for a distinction between primary and compound metaphors. Several aspects of buildings fail to map onto theories (floors, walls, ceiling, etc.), and no direct experiences correlate theorizing with building a structure; Grady and his colleagues point out that, if the metaphor is analyzed as a compound of LOGICAL STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE and PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT, these difficulties disappear. However, Grady’s analysis reifies the verbal manifestation of a conceptual metaphor: The propositional form, in this instance THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, is but “a mnemonic for a set of ontological correspondences…” (Lakoff, 1993: 207). The attempt to map building parts such as floors, walls, ceiling, etc. onto theories assumes that metaphorical entailments and extensions are pushed by the vehicle rather than pulled by whatever users desire to convey about the topic. In the spirit of Lakoff’s (1993) analysis, it would seem sufficient that a user casting about for a concept that expresses a particular aspect of theory find an instance of that concept in some aspect of buildings. It seems reasonable to interpret THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS in terms of LOGICAL STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE and PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT, but it also seems reasonable to seek a more direct interpretation, in terms of the metaphor user’s immediate experience with buildings as exemplars of structured relationships among parts. Indeed, all of these seem to belong to and instantiate different aspects of a single underlying conceptual field.

Grady’s (1997a) proposal is quite different from Lakoff’s (1993) idea that metaphorical mappings are sometimes organized in “inheritance hierarchies.” Lakoff gives the example of LOVE IS A JOURNEY (“Our relationship is going nowhere”), which makes use of the structure and inherits the entailments of A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which in turn fits into the event structure metaphor, that maps events onto location and motion through space. Grady’s proposal also differs from the distinction between the lexicalized but still lively metaphors (such as EMOTION IS HEAT and MORE IS UP) that form the core of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) argument on the one hand and the “novel metaphors” discussed at length by Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Lakoff (1993: 229 ff.). These do not necessarily fall into discrete categories, but form a continuum, ranging from the metaphors such as EMOTION IS HEAT and MORE IS UP, grounded in experiences that begin in very early childhood, through metaphors such as ARGUMENT IS PHYSICAL CONFLICT and SOCIAL OBLIGATIONS ARE PHYSICAL CONSTRAINTS, grounded in experiences that begin somewhat later in childhood, to self-consciously literary metaphors such as the old favorite of metaphor theorists, “Juliet is the sun,” and the vernacular “You are my sunshine” (Davis & Mitchell, 1940).

Verbal combat vs. rational argument. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, pp. 62ff) contrast the kind of verbal combat associated with “argument is war” with rational argument, in which participants are expected to follow an architectural rather than a military metaphor, to support their positions with reasoning based on evidence rather than defend their position with aggressive tactics such as intimidation, threat, or insult, or with evasive tactics such as appeal to authority, belittling, evading the issue, flattery, and bargaining. In spite of our stated preference for cool rationality, they claim, we tend to conceive of and discuss rational argument in terms of war metaphors, and supposedly rational arguments often rely heavily on the “irrational” tactics of combat, even within academic, legal, and other contexts where reason is presumed to reign supreme.

However, many of the tactics Lakoff and Johnson mention (intimidation, threat, insult) are more closely related to one-on-one interpersonal conflict than to organized warfare, and others belong to domains quite removed from physical violence (e.g., evading the issue, bargaining, and flattery). Rational argument is sometimes undermined by tactics metaphorically drawn from organized warfare, but it is also undermined by tactics metaphorically drawn from competitive games or the showmanship of a professional stage magician (bluffing, distraction, sleight of hand). During the American Civil War, Confederate General Magruder drew on his talent for stagecraft to formulate effective defensive tactics (Catton, 1963) – but that does not make theatrical terms into war metaphors! Rather, the application of dramatical terms (“theater of operations, “stage an invasion”) to war is itself metaphorical. In sum, the examples Lakoff and Johnson give to support their contention that argument even in an academic context is structured in terms of war are more consistent with the view that common metaphors can be interpreted in terms of multiple conceptual metaphors or metaphor systems. It is an empirical question, which of the various metaphorical systems is tapped by a particular reader or listener in any particular instance.

Argument within a field of conflict metaphors. It appears that our culture has a large, complex, and densely interconnected conceptual field, a set of schemas for competition and conflict ranging from friendly, low ego-involvement games through highly competitive games, shouting matches, fisticuffs, brawls, all the way to full-scale war (see Eubanks, 2000; Gibbs, 1994; 1997). Within this conceptual field, we readily transfer expressions associated with one form of competition or conflict to others. Moreover, another form of indirect speech is often at play here, the ironical use of understatement and overstatement. Using understatement, we metaphorically transfer terms from fencing, chess, and boxing to speak of one army (in actual warfare) “parrying the thrust,” “countering the move,” or “blocking the punch” of another army; using overstatement, we metaphorically transfer terms from actual warfare to speak of a quarterback “throwing the long bomb” or an orator “overwhelming his opponent’s defenses.” We also use overstatement in saying that an orator “brought his opponent to his knees,” a metaphor based on person-to-person combat or athletic competition rather than on warfare between armies (Eubanks, 2000, makes a similar point). Some terms are associated with more than one type of competitive or aggressive activity: It is not evident that “strategy” and “position” are adapted to chess from warfare, rather than the reverse. Other terms, such as “submission,” seem more immediately connected with group hierarchy and rituals of dominance than with warfare. To paraphrase von Clausewitz (1968), war is itself a continuation of dominance rituals by other means.

Metaphor as categorization. Glucksberg and Keysar (1993) propose that a metaphor establishes a superordinate category, to which both vehicle and topic belong, that includes all objects having the relevant qualities. They give the example, “cigarettes are time bombs,” which establishes a superordinate category of potentially deadly objects that seem harmless at first but eventually kill. Chiappe & Kennedy (2001) object that it is difficult to see what the superordinate category view adds to the search for similarities associated with the implied simile view. Moreover, both the “superordinate category” model and the “search for similarities” model are, at least in some instances, inherently circular: Consider another of Glucksberg and Keysar’s examples, “My job is a jail,” which places “my job” into “the category of things that the metaphor vehicle jail typifies – situations that are unpleasant, confining, difficult to escape from, unrewarding, and so on” (Glucksberg, Keysar, & McGlone, 1992, p. 578). Cigarettes and time bombs do share the literal category-defining quality of leading eventually to death but, in the absence of legalized slavery, a job does not share the qualities that define jails except in a sense that is already metaphorical (Ritchie, 2003; see also Lakoff, 1993).

The category of social contentions. Nevertheless it is useful to look at some families of metaphors in terms of superordinate categories. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) concede that it is often difficult to distinguish metaphor from subcategorization, because it is not always clear whether two activities are of the same or different kinds. They give as an example, “an argument is a fight.” If we think of “fight” in general terms, an argument is a fight that doesn’t involve blows, and a war is a fight that involves much more than blows. Their point is well-taken, and it can usefully be extended much further. It may be useful to think of a very general category of situations, in which two parties have opposing ideas, beliefs, intentions, etc., that may or may not lead to violent conflict. We might think of this general category as “All Abstractly Similar Contending Activities” (Eubanks, 2000) or, more simply, as the category of social contentions.

Within the general category of social contentions are several sub-categories, including physical fights and other forms of conflict, as well as situations in which the contention is primarily between factual propositions, and little of emotional or social import is at stake. When this second sort of contention arises, all participants are less concerned that their own proposals are accepted than that the correct or most useful proposal is accepted. When two friends, hiking through the woods, come to a fork in the trail, what matters most is that they both take the trail that leads to their destination, not that the other person accept their own view as to which trail is the correct one.

Other sub-categories include those in which material possessions are at stake, ranging from control of territory to possession of a house following a divorce, and those in which intangible assets such as social status and self-esteem are at stake. The sub-categories often blur into one another: A simple discussion about which trail leads to the destination can involve a threat to social status and self-esteem if one’s abilities as an outdoorsman seem to be in question. Ordinarily, an academic dispute is presumed to be like the case of hikers coming to a fork in the trail: What matters most is that we select the best theory, and thus avoid wasting time and resources. But as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) point out, issues of prestige and self-esteem often become implicated in an academic dispute, and indeed material wealth (in the form of grants, promotions, and so forth) are often at stake (see also Sweetser, 1992). In short, we seem to have a continuum of social contentions, running from a simple game or an intellectual discussion at one end through violent inter-personal combat (a fist-fight or duel) to group combat (a gang rumble or all-out war) at the other: The higher the perceived stakes, and the lower the commitment to continued social interactions among the participants, the farther we are likely to move toward the violent end of the continuum.

Multiple meanings or metaphorical meanings? Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) argue for a “multiple meaning” account of terms such as attack and defend, which are applied both to warfare and to arguments. They acknowledge that attack may have originated in a metaphorical application, but argue that it has come to have two separate and independent meanings. Consider, “Jane considered his attack on her argument as an attack on her intellectual integrity.” Vervaeke and Kennedy point out that we could substitute a synonym such as “refutation of” for the first use of attack and a different synonym (“assault”) for the second use, but these could not be interchanged without a radical change of meaning: An assault on an argument is not the same as an attack on an argument, and a refutation of one’s intellectual integrity doesn’t make sense at all. From this, Vervaeke and Kennedy conclude that there are actually two separate words, attack as a synonym for assault and attack as a synonym for attempt to refute.

But compare attack to a true homograph, ring, “a circular object or figure” and ring, “to give forth a clear, resonant sound.” These are distinct words, derived from different roots, that happen coincidentally to be spelled and pronounced the same in English. By contrast, attack is one word, with a single root, and all of its many meanings have in common a sense of aggression, hostility, and a lack of restraint, in contrast with apparent synonyms such as “try to disprove” and “try to refute.” To attack an argument is not the same as to refute an argument, to give a counter-example, or to construct a counter-argument. These are indeed synonyms, but they are substitutable only in a particular context, and they are not equivalents. It is precisely the association, perhaps with war, perhaps with a fist-fight, but at least with some form of aggressive conflict, that differentiates our response to an attack from our response to a refutation or a counter-argument. This sense of aggression and hostility can only derive from a metaphorical association with conflict, although not necessarily with war per se. To attack an opponent’s argument is to do something more than merely to try to refute it, and to “demolish” an opponent’s argument is to do something much more than merely to “demonstrate its inconsistencies.” That something more is approximately the sense of conflict and no-holds-barred antagonism suggested by the metaphorical association with childhood name-calling and fist-fights, as well as with adult activities such as mugging and all-out war. It would not seem unreasonable for Jane to interpret an “attack” on her argument as an “attack” on her intellectual integrity, but it would seem unreasonable if she should interpret an “attempt to refute” her argument as an “assault” on her intellectual integrity. We would expect, or at least condone, an angry and resentful response to an “attack,” but we would expect a more reasoned and calm response to an “attempt to refute.”

Conceptual blending. Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) explain the metaphorical mapping process in terms of underlying concepts, claiming that we actually experience the target concept in terms of the source. Thus, an exasperated worker who complains, “This job is a jail” is inviting the listener to experience the supervisor as a prison guard, the workplace as a barred cell, and the employment contract as a sentence. A more general account, that subsumes Lakoff and Johnson’s “conceptual metaphors,” is provided by conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998; 2002; see also Coulson & Matlock, 2001). According to this approach, the conceptual structures of two or more “input spaces” (e.g., topic and source) are selectively combined into a new, separate, “blended” mental space (the metaphor), which is then available for further blending. “Men are wolves” (Gentner & Bowdle, 2001) combines the schema of men who are single-minded and emotionally uninvolved in pursuit of sexual gratification with a pre-existing schema of wolves as heartless and vicious predators, itself a prior blend of various terrors once associated with life at the edge of a wilderness and the observed and imagined behavior of actual wolves in pursuit of their prey. “My job is a jail” blends the mental image of the speaker’s working conditions with a pre-existing schema of jail, itself a blend of various emotions associated with social and physical constraints and mediated accounts of life in a jail or prison. Conceptual blending seems to provide a non-circular explanation for metaphor interpretation, although I am not yet convinced that it represents more than a useful metaphor for poorly-understood neurological processes, and it remains unclear what kind of data can falsify it (Gibbs, 2001).

Are metaphorical meanings fixed? Speakers sometimes use words with little consideration of entailments, and hearers sometimes think very little about these entailments while interpreting an utterance (Steen, 1999). As Vervaeke and Kennedy suggest, a novel metaphor “may be interpreted very differently by different audiences…” (1996, p. 283); following Clark (1996), I would suggest that most metaphors, including many of the most familiar, are subject to this indeterminacy. When a term such as “attack,” “defend,” or “strategy” appears in a discussion of an argument, we cannot be sure whether any particular person will associate the term with chess, boxing, or all-out war – or with nothing beyond an abstract concept. How any particular speaker intends a metaphor to be interpreted, and how any particular hearer does interpret the metaphor, can never be absolutely determined.

This indeterminacy of metaphors can be the occasion for serious miscommunication: Consider an argument between friends or spouses, described by one participant, thinking of the argument as a chess match, in terms such as “strategy,” “attack,” and “defend.” In chess, one hopes the opponent will be willing to repeat the engagement in the future, win or lose, but in war, one hopes to win so overwhelmingly that there will be no future engagement. If the other participant associates these terms with war, the result is likely to be an unhappy one (Reddy, 1993; Schoen, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). As Vervaeke and Kennedy suggest (albeit with respect to novel metaphors), elucidating the conditions under which an individual will make one or another set of metaphorical connections, or none at all, is “an important task for empirical scientists” (1996, p. 283).

Does metaphor influence thought? Vervaeke and Kennedy insist that “the idea that metaphors govern thought needs to be firmly restricted. Rather, a metaphor is often chosen from a set of alternative metaphors with widely differing implications to express an idea that is literal” (1996, p. 283). I do not see these as mutually exclusive ideas – although “governs” may be rather too strong a metaphor, and “literal” is difficult to define precisely (Gibbs, 1994; Kittay, 1987; Rumelhart, 1993). If many of our abstract concepts are themselves shaped by structural metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) contend, then we do not have very many truly “literal” ideas to express, beyond the basic ideas that are grounded in direct physical experience, like “I fell down,” “I stood up,” and “I ate a carrot.”

Metaphor can be hypothesized to influence thought in at least two ways, without contradicting the hypothesis that people more or less deliberately select metaphors to express their ideas as clearly as possible. First, to the extent that the language most readily available for discussing an abstract concept is shaped by a certain set of metaphors, we will find it difficult to express contradictory ideas about that concept without inventing new metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; 1999; Reddy, 1993; Schoen, 1993). Second, to the extent that a hearer is induced to process the entailments of a metaphor, these entailments will become part of the meaning of the concept in the present context (Kovecses, 1995). It is, indeed, for this reason that a speaker would choose one metaphor rather than another: It would be no use choosing an expression based on “LOVE IS A JOURNEY” rather than “LOVE IS A NATURAL DISASTER” if the entailments particular to each implicit metaphor could not be expected to have a distinctive influence on the thoughts and responses of the listener.

Metaphor as field of associated cognitive responses

I would like to propose an alternative account, that goes part of the way with Vervaeke and Kennedy, yet preserves the most important insights from Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis. As suggested by Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996, p. 282), words like attack and defend have, through various metaphorical extensions, taken on a broader set of meanings, connected not only with discourse about war and other situations of conflict, but also with aggressive forms of argument and aggressive interactions in general. Such a metaphorical extension creates a “field” of meanings (Katz, 1992), including the entailments, images, responses, and expectations evoked by the metaphor vehicle, as well as with the various topics to which the metaphor is typically or routinely applied. It little matters whether the conflict metaphors discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) originate with war, with childhood rough-and-tumble, or with other forms of conflict; they carry a set of potential meanings derived from all of these, and from their application to chess, bridge, basketball, and school debate tournaments as well. This full range of entailments, images, responses and expectations is available as part of the common base of language and experience (Clark, 1996; Eubanks, 2000; Gibbs, 1994; 1997) whenever the words that belong to a group of metaphors are used, although only some of them will be intended by a speaker, and not all of them will be accessed by someone who hears or reads the metaphor.

As Clark (1996) observes, a hearer often interprets an utterance (literal or metaphorical) to mean something different from what the speaker intended, and the problem of coordinating what the speaker is taken to mean is by no means trivial. In many cases, including stock phrases such as “the stock market is falling,” a preferred meaning has been so completely lexicalized as to eliminate much of the ambiguity. However, even some stock phrases continue to afford a certain level of ambiguity: If “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence,” does the speaker engage in self-criticism because her neighbor works harder (“has a prettier lawn”) or does she indulge in envy for her neighbor who has more opportunities (“has better forage”)? Often the context provides clues, as Romeo’s line, “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” helps us make sense of the following, “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” (Shakespeare, 1952: Act Two Scene II, 3-4), but as the persistent critical speculations about Shakespeare’s metaphor demonstrate (e.g., Searle, 1993), context doesn’t necessarily eliminate ambiguity (cf. Stern, 2000).

Non-directional metaphors. In some cases, metaphors are one-way streets, and the field of meanings is derived entirely from the vehicle. Phrases associated with “A LIFE IS A JOURNEY” call upon those entailments of journey that seem applicable to life; the reverse, “a journey is A lIFe,” does not make sense (except perhaps in some very peculiar context). However, when a set of vehicles and targets (war, athletic games, and argument) all have characteristics that shed light on the others, the metaphors are reversible, and the fields of meaning created by reversing the metaphors may become partially blended (Turner & Fauconnier, 1999). Thus, it can make sense to describe war in terms of argument or argument in terms of war, war in terms of boxing or boxing in terms of war. The entailments are of course reversed (Gibbs, 1994): “an athletic contest is war” or “trade is war” (Eubanks, 2000) invests sports or trade with aggressiveness and ruthlessness, but “war is an athletic contest” or “war is trade” invests war with a sense of rules and fair play on the one hand or with a sense of rational calculation of potential gains and losses on the other. The fields of meaning created by these transposed metaphors can blur into one another, until it does not seem strange to use both, together, as a metaphor for argument, business, or politics, and in some cases it seems to be difficult to establish with any certainty whether the vehicle of a metaphorical expression is intended to be “war,” “sports,” or “chess.”

Metaphors as mapping of cognitive responses. Finally, I would like to propose a modification to the “conceptual metaphor” approach (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and suggest that, at least in some instances, metaphors evoke a set of responses (emotions, social relationships, cultural and physical expectations, etc.), that may be associated primarily with the vehicle, or may be uniquely evoked by the combination of vehicle and topic. It is these expectations and emotional responses that establish the basis for comparison and define the “superordinate category” (Keysar & Glucksberg, 1992) to which a topic is assigned by a metaphor, and not necessarily any of the particular qualities of the metaphor vehicle. Thus, we need not find any qualities common to Juliet and the sun in order to make sense of Romeo’s declaration that “Juliet is the sun” (Shakespeare, Act II, Scene II, line 3). From the preceding phrases, “What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east,” we know that Romeo wishes to tell us that the sight of Juliet’s face in the window arouses in him the same sort of responses and expectations that the rising sun elicits. From the immediately subsequent lines, beginning “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief…” we further learn that the sight of Juliet’s face arouses in him the same expectations, with respect to her potential competitors (Rosaline in particular, mentioned by Mercutio in the immediately preceding scene), that the sun arouses with respect to the moon and stars. There are no qualities common to a young woman and the sun that could possibly define a superordinate category, and none is needed: What their metaphorical juxtaposition brings to the fore is the kind of emotions, comparisons, and expectations they each arouse.

At least in the case of metaphors that express such widely shared experience that they have become stock expressions in a culture, the correlations evoked by a metaphor are not between particular qualities or types, but between emotions, sensations, and expectations on the one hand and the situations that typically evoke these cognitive states on the other. The correlated cognitive states may be activated by the juxtaposition of topic and vehicle, as with “Juliet is the sun,” or they may be activated by the vehicle alone: Tourangeau and Rips (1991) found that subjects can readily interpret blank metaphors, of the form “X is the Napoleon of birds.” Similarly, in THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS (Grady, 1997a), our evaluative responses and expectations to theories draw upon another blank metaphor, “X IS A BUILDING” ( “X has a firm foundation,” “X is falling apart,” “construct a solid X”), and “My job is a jail” (Keysar & Glucksberg, 1992) instantiates a more general blank metaphor, “X IS CONFINEMENT.”

In “My job is a jail,” the metaphor is established, not by “situations that are unpleasant, confining, difficult to escape from, unrewarding, and so on” (Glucksberg, Keysar, & McGlone, 1992, p. 578) but by our responses to these situations. A similar sense of constraint is captured in a number of related expressions, for example, an adolescent may complain that “this house is a prison,” or, if he is really frustrated, “a concentration camp.” An old dysphemism for a domineering spouse is “ball and chain,” and we speak of being “stuck in a rut,” “mired in indecision,” “bound hand and foot,” “tied down,” and so forth. What these all have in common is a feeling of restricted action, choices, or options. The associated emotion may be reactance, as when an adolescent describes his home and family as a “prison” or “concentration camp,” dissonance reduction, as when a worker describes her job as a “jail” (and thereby denies her actual ability to quit and seek an alternative job), or even an ironical expression of affection and commitment, as in “Blest be the tie that binds” (Fawcett, 1782) and “I keep the ends out for the tie that binds” (Cash, 1956). The sense of incapacity to change a situation, nullify a social or emotional commitment, or find the answer to a problem or puzzle is almost impossible to express except through some metaphor associated with bondage or confinement.

As with the metaphorical field surrounding confrontation, people begin from an early age to experience feelings of frustration, reactance, and cognitive dissonance – as well as the more positive feelings of challenge and competitive stimulation – when they find themselves physically, socially, or intellectually constrained. Infants and young children experience unpleasant physical constraint in their cribs and high chairs or when adults or older children block their access to fragile or dangerous items, but they also delight in being loosely constrained in an adult’s limbs while they try to wriggle free. Later, as they become socialized, children experience social constraint when some desired action is prohibited by adults, when faced with a choice between equally desirable objects or courses of action, when constrained by a previously given promise or by the threat of social disapproval. The subjective experiences elicited by social constraints and intellectual puzzles are similar in various ways to each other and to those elicited by physical constraints, and the many forms of physical and social constraint are ready to hand for expressing and understanding these experiences. In conversations and in mass media we encounter a large field of other constraints that provide a ready source of metaphors, including jail, prison, ball and chain, briar patches, tangled yarn, jungles, indebtedness, mazes, puzzles, monastic vows, and so on.

The complex feelings aroused by physical or social constraints are associated in our memories, and they do form a “category” of sorts. But the category is defined, not in terms of “things that are confining, punitive, and impossible to escape” (Glucksberg, Keysar & McGlone, 1992, p. 578), but in terms more like “things that give me feelings and expectations associated with constraint, challenge, frustration, and reactance.” Glucksberg et al. contend that “jail” is the prototypical member of such a category, but as with the “category” of social confrontations, there are many exemplars, each expressing a subtly different aspect of the underlying experience, including “strait jacket,” “tied up,” “chained,” “in hock,” and “married” (as in “married to a theory”).

Conclusion:

Although I concur with the general thrust of Vervaeke and Kennedy’s (1996) critique, I have argued that they overstate their case, in part because of an excessively narrow interpretation of their examples. Close analysis of both commonplace and original metaphors can help to illuminate the embodied interactions among language, thought, and culture, but the interpretations must be thorough, open to additional interpretive paths, and, at least in principle, informed by the variety of rhetorical and cultural contexts in which the metaphors are actually used.

I have extended Vervaeke and Kennedy’s criticism of the proposition that a collection of metaphors is necessarily interpretable only with respect to a single implicit metaphor at a single level, arguing that the phrases Lakoff and Johnson interpret in terms of “ARGUMENT IS WAR” emerge from a field of inter-related concepts, including athletic contests, games, and interpersonal quarrels as well as war and argument: The associations of each of these concepts are available for metaphorical application to the others as well as to external concepts such as business and politics. I have argued that it is more consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphorical grounding to base our understanding of the entire set of contention metaphors on the sort of competitive games and interpersonal conflict that are experienced from early childhood throughout the life-span. A similar analysis can be applied to any complex field of metaphors, as I have shown with respect to metaphors of constraint.

It is more complex, but the picture that emerges from a more extended and thorough interpretation of common metaphors leaves the broad outlines of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) original account more or less intact. Although there is insufficient space here to work out the details, I believe the two accounts are compatible, and a combination of both may be required for a complete understanding of metaphor. The account I propose seems particularly consistent with Lakoff’s (1993) point, previously cited, that the propositional expression of a conceptual metaphor is but a mnemonic, and not to be accorded independent status. In addition to Lakoff and Johnson’s neat pyramid of conceptual metaphors, building from the most basic physical experiences of orientation, pain, and so forth toward extremely abstract concepts such as love, causality, and God, we may find that we have several recursive, continually reconstructed fields of figurative / literal concepts, in which the metaphorical mappings link cognitive responses and expectations to an overlapping continuum of prototypical experiences, and we may often be unable to determine with certainty how a particular speaker intends or a particular listener interprets a given metaphor.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, and especially Dr. Ray Gibbs, for their many thoughtful and provocative comments on earlier drafts of this essay, which has been considerably improved as a result. Any remaining oversights, omissions, or mistakes are of course entirely my own responsibility.

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Steen, G. J. (1999). Analyzing metaphor in literature: With examples from William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Poetics Today, 20(3), 499-522.

Stern, J. (2000). Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Turner, M., and Fauconnier, G. (1999). A Mechanism of Creativity. Poetics Today, 20(3), 397-418.

Tourangeau, R., and Rips, L. (1991). Interpreting and evaluating metaphors. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 452-472.

Vervaeke, J. and Kennedy, J. M. (1996). Metaphors in language and thought: Falsification and multiple meanings. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 11(4), 273-284.

Von Clausewitz, C. (1968). On War. (T. Kilmartin, Trans.) New York: Norton.

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法语多媒体教学网站 http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/index.html

法英对照, 有许多实用字汇及影音, 初学者可多加利用.

法语动词变化 http://www.hku.hk/french/starters/lexis/fiche06_verb1.htm

法语动词变化很难但也很重要, 希望这个网站对学员们能有所帮助.

想取个法文名字吗? 可进入此网站查查 http://www.prenom.com/

http://www.lexode.com/keskidi/artiste52330titre.html

法国儿歌欣赏 :有歌词及歌唱语音播放. 相信学法语的您很快就可以朗朗上口.

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法国国铁 SNCF 网路订票 : http://www.voyagessncf.com/dynamic/_SvHomePage

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推荐一个小语种学习网,其中有法语,很好的哦 http://www.languageguide.org/

http://www.languageguide.org/ 里面的法语单词都分门别类的还图文并茂法语单词读音也很好听也~~~ 可以学到很多基本的法语单词!

CCTV的法语频道可以在网上直接看原来CCTV的法语频道可以在网上直接看的，我到现在才发现。内容还挺多的。大家仔细找找还有法语音乐什么的，也可以在线看。

http://fr.cctv.com/francais/　这个是首页。

http://fr.cctv.com/program/journal/02/07/index.shtml

这个是可以在线观看的，速度还不错。顺便在讲一下，不知道是我浏览器的原因，还是什么原因，浏览CCTV的东西要刷新两三次，才能打开网站…… 全是免费的资源，音像，影像，文本教程一应俱全，有法语，西班牙语，德语还有意大利语。英语解说。

法语： http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/

西班牙语： http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/

学法语的网站,很不错的,英法对照噢 http://bbc.co.uk/languages

很多法语视频 还有很多音乐，电影片段 http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/programmes/accueil_continent.php

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/

最好的该算是 BBC 的 French Steps 当然，这需要你有一定的英语基础，毕竟这是人家英国人学法语的网站，用flash做的，全对话场景教学，并有配套

教材供下载中国国际广播电台

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French Tutorial http://www.frenchtutorial.com/

http://www.rfi.fr

法国国际广播电台的官方网站，左侧 la langue francaise很好的，有文稿，是每日新闻，声音文件可以下载!一些法文法语学习网站

出租方(甲方)Lessor (hereinafter referred to as Party A) ：

承租方(乙方)Lessee (hereinafter referred to as Party B) ：

根据国家有关法律、法规和有关规定，甲、乙双方在平等自愿的基础上，经友好协商一致，就甲方将其合法拥有的房屋出租给乙方使用，乙方承租使用甲方房屋事宜，订立本合同。

In accordance with relevant Chinese laws 、decrees and pertinent rules and regulations ,Party A and Party B have reached an agreement through friendly consultation to conclude the following contract.

一、 物业地址 Location of the premises

甲方将其所有的位于上海市_________区____________________________________的房屋及其附属设施在良好状态下出租给乙方___________使用。

Party A will lease to Party B the premises and attached facilities all owned by Party A itself, which is located at _______________________________________ __________________________ and in good condition for_____________ .

二、 房屋面积 Size of the premises

出租房屋的登记面积为_________平方米(建筑面积)。

The registered size of the leased premises is_________square meters (Gross size).

三、 租赁期限 Lease term

租赁期限自_______年___月___日起至_______年___月___日止，为期___年，甲方应于_______年___月___日将房屋腾空并交付乙方使用。

The lease term will be from _____(month) _____(day) _______(year) to ________(month) _____(day) _______(year). Party A will clear the premises and provide it to Party B for use before _____(month) _____(day) _______(year).

四、 租金 Rental

1. 数额：双方商定租金为每月人民币_____________元整, 乙方以___________形式支付给甲方 。

Amount: the rental will be ____________per month. Party B will pay the rental

to Party A in the form of ____________in ________________.

2. 租金按_____月为壹期支付;第一期租金于_______年_____月_____日以前付清;以后每期租金于每月的______日以前缴纳，先付后住(若乙方以汇款形式支付租金，则以汇出日为支付日，汇费由汇出方承担)。甲方收到租金后予书面签收。

Payment of rental will be one installment everymonth(s). The first installment will be paid before_______(month)______(day)__________(year). Each successive installment will be paid_____________each month.

Party B will pay the rental before using the premises and attached facilities (In case Party B pays the rental in the form of remittance, the date of remitting will be the day of payment and the remittance fee will be borne by the remitter.) Party A will issue a written receipt after receiving the payment.

3. 如乙方逾期支付租金超过十天，则每天以月租金的0.5%支付滞纳金;如乙方逾期支付租金超过十五天，则视为乙方自动退租，构成违约，甲方有权收回房屋，并追究乙方违约责任。

In case the rental is more than ten working days overdue, Party B will pay 0.5 percent of monthly rental as overdue fine every day, if the rental be paid 15 days overdue, Party B will be deemed to have with drawn from the premises and breach the contract. In this situation, Party A has the right to take back the premises and take actions against party B’s breach.

五、 保证金 Deposit

1. 为确保房屋及其附属设施之安全与完好，及租赁期内相关费用之如期结算，乙方同意于______年_____月_____日前支付给甲方保证金人民币 _________元整，甲方在收到保证金后予以书面签收。

Guarantying the safety and good conditions of the premises and attached facilities and account of relevant fees are settled on schedule during the lease term, party B will pay _________to party A as a deposit before _____(month) _____(day) _______(year). Party A will issue a written receipt after receiving the deposit.

2. 除合同另有约定外，甲方应于租赁关系消除且乙方迁空、点清并付清所有应付费用后的当天将保证金全额无息退还乙方。

Unless otherwise provided for by this contract, Party A will return full amount of the deposit without interest on the day when this contract expires and party B clears the premises and has paid all due rental and other expenses.

3. 因乙方违反本合同的规定而产生的违约金、损坏赔偿金和其它相关费用，甲方可在保证金中抵扣，不足部分乙方必须在接到甲方付款通知后十日内补足。

In case party B breaches this contract, party A has right to deduct the default fine, compensation for damage or any other expenses from the deposit . In case the deposit is not sufficient to cover such items, Party B should pay the insufficiency within ten days after receiving the written notice of payment from Party A.

六、 甲方义务 Obligations of Party A

1. 甲方须按时将房屋及附属设施(详见附件)交付乙方使用。

Party A will provide the premises and attached facilities (see the appendix of furniture list for detail) on schedule to Party B for using.

2. 房屋设施如因质量原因、自然损耗或灾害而受到损坏，甲方有修缮并承担相关费用的责任。

In case the premise and attached facilities are damaged by quality problems, natural damages or disasters, Party A will be responsible to repair and pay the relevant expenses.

3. 甲方应确保出租的房屋享有出租的权利，反之如乙方权益因此遭受损害，甲方应负赔偿责任。

Party A will guarantee the lease right of the premises. Otherwise, Party A will be responsible to compensate Party B’s losses.

七、 乙方义务 Obligations of Party B

1. 乙方应按合同的规定按时支付定金、租金及保证金。

Party B will pay the rental, the deposit and other expenses on time.

2. 乙方经甲方同意，可在房屋内添置设备。租赁期满后，乙方将添置的设备搬走，并保证不影响房屋的完好及正常使用。

Party B may decorate the premises and add new facilities with Party A’s approval. When this contract expires, Party B may take away the added facilities which are removable without changing the good conditions of the premises for normal use.

3. 未经甲方同意，乙方不得将承租的房屋转租或分租，并爱护使用该房屋如因乙方过失或过错致使房屋及设施受损，乙方应承担赔偿责任。

Party B will not transfer the lease of the premises or sublet it without Party A’s approval and should take good care of the premises. Otherwise, Party B will be responsible to compensate any damages of the premises and attached facilities caused by its fault and negligence.

4. 乙方应按本合同规定合法使用该房屋，不得擅自改变使用性质。乙方不得在该房屋内存放危险物品。否则，如该房屋及附属设施因此受损，乙方应承担全部责任。

Party B will use the premises lawfully according to this contract without changing the nature of the premises and storing hazardous materials in it. Otherwise, Party B will be responsible for the damages caused by it

5. 乙方应承担租赁期内的水、电、煤气、电讯、收视费、等一切因实际使用而产生的费用，并按单如期缴纳。

Party B will bear the cost of utilities such as communications, water, electricity, gas, management fee etc. on time during the lease term.

八、 合同终止及解除的规定 Termination and dissolution of the contract

1. 乙方在租赁期满后如需退租或续租，应提前两个月通知甲方，由双方另行协商退租或续租事宜。在同等条件下乙方享有优先续租权。

Within two months before the contract expires, Party B will notify Party A if it intends to extend the leasehold. In this situation, two parties will discuss matters over the extension.

2. 租赁期满后，乙方应在当天将房屋交还甲方;任何滞留物，如未取得甲方谅解，均视为放弃，任凭甲方处置，乙方决无异议。

When the lease term expires, Party B will return the premises and attached facilities to Party A within days. Any belongings left in it without Party A’s previous understanding will be deemed to be abandoned by Party B. In this situation, Party A has the right to dispose of it and Party A will raise no objection.

3. 本合同一经双方签字后立即生效;未经双方同意，不得任意终止，如有未尽事宜，甲、乙双方可另行协商。

This contract will be effective after being signed by both parties. Any party has no right to terminate this contract without another party’s agreement. Anything not covered in this contract will be discussed separately by both parties

九、 违约及处理 Breach of the contract

1. 甲、乙双方任何一方在未征得对方谅解的情况下，不履行本合同规定条款，导致本合同中途中止，则视为该方违约，双方同意违约金为人民币___________元整，若违约金不足弥补无过错方之损失，则违约方还需就不足部分支付赔偿金。

During the lease term, any party who fails to fulfill any article of this contract without the other party’s understanding will be deemed to breach the contract. Both parties agree that the default fine will be________________. In case the default fine is not sufficient to cover the loss suffered by the faultless party, the party in breach should pay additional compensation to the other party.

2. 若双方在执行本合同或与本合同有关的事情时发生争议，应首先友好协商;协商不成，可向有管辖权的人民法院提起诉讼。本合同一经双方签字后立即生效;未经双方同意，不得任意终止，如有未尽事宜，甲、乙双方可另行协商。

Both parties will solve the disputes arising from execution of the contract or in connection with the contract through friendly consultation. In case the agreement cannot be reached, any party may summit the dispute to the court that has the jurisdiction over the matter.

十、 其他 Miscellaneous

1. 本合同附件是本合同的有效组成部分，与本合同具有同等法律效力。

Any annex is the integral part of this contract. The annex and this contract are equally valid.

2. 本合同壹式贰份，甲、乙双方各执一份。

There are 2 originals of this contract. Each party will hold 1 original(s).

3. 甲、乙双方如有特殊约定，可在本款另行约定：

Other special terms will be listed bellows:

__________________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________________

甲 方：

Party A

证件号码：

ID No

联络地址：

Address

电 话：

Tel:

代 理 人：

Representative:

日 期：

Date:

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Source: Daily Research News Online, www.mrweb.com/news