The book elaborates one of Roman Jakobson's many brilliant ideas, i.e. his insight that the two cognitive strategies of the metaphoric and the metonymic are the end-points on a continuum of conceptualization processes. This elaboration is achieved on the background of Lakoff and Johnson's two-domain approach, i.e. the mapping of a source onto a target domain of conceptualization. Further approaches dwell on different stretches of this metaphor-metonymy continuum.
Mastery of basic language skills is the overarching goal of the English in Context series. To this end, each of the six worktexts has been carefully designed to “begin at the beginning” and gradually proceed along the skills continuum. The low reading level (approximately 4.0) is consistent throughout the program.
In attempting to understand and explain various behaviour, events, and phenomena in their field, psychologists have developed and enunciated an enormous number of best guesses or theories concerning the phenomenon in question. Such theories involve speculations and statements that range on a potency continuum from strong to weak. The term theory, itself, has been conceived of in various ways in the psychological literature.