Conceptual structure is embodied
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C5P157
2025-12-14
44
Conceptual structure is embodied
A fundamental concern for cognitive semanticists is the nature of the relationship between conceptual structure and the external world of sensory experience. In other words, cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is consonant with the ways in which we experience the world. One idea that has emerged in an attempt to explain the nature of conceptual organisation on the basis of interaction with the physical world is the embodied cognition thesis, which we introduced in Chapter 2. As we saw, this thesis holds that the nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated.
Let’s illustrate this idea with an example. Imagine a man in a locked room. A room has the structural properties associated with a bounded landmark: it has enclosed sides, an interior, a boundary and an exterior. As a consequence of these properties, the bounded landmark has the additional functional property of containment: the man is unable to leave the room. Although this seems rather obvious, observe that this instance of containment is partly a consequence of the properties of the bounded landmark and partly a consequence of the properties of the human body. Humans cannot pass through minute crevices like gas can, or crawl through the gaps under doors like ants can. In other words, containment is a meaningful consequence of a particular type of physical relationship that we have experienced in interaction with the external world.
The concept associated with containment is an instance of what cognitive linguists call an image schema. In the cognitive model, the image-schematic concept represents one of the ways in which bodily experience gives rise to meaningful concepts. While the concept CONTAINER is grounded in the directly embodied experience of interacting with bounded landmarks, image schematic conceptual structure can also give rise to more abstract kinds of meaning. For example, consider the following examples from Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 32):
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) both argue that examples like the ones in (1) are licensed by the metaphorical projection of the CONTAINER image schema onto the abstract conceptual domain of STATES, to which concepts like LOVE, TROUBLE and HEALTH belong. This results in the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE CONTAINERS. The idea behind metaphorical projection is that meaningful structure from bodily experience gives rise to concrete concepts like the CON TAINER image schema, which in turn serves to structure more abstract conceptual domains like STATES. In this way, conceptual structure is embodied. We will look in detail at image schemas in Chapter 6.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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