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The bodily basis of meaning

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C5P163

2025-12-15

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The bodily basis of meaning

Given the thesis of embodied cognition that we discussed earlier (section 5.1.2), a key area of investigation within cognitive semantics concerns the bodily basis of meaning (see Chapter 6). Given the assumption that conceptual structure is meaningful by virtue of being tied to directly meaningful pre conceptual (bodily) experience, much research within the cognitive semantics tradition has been directed at investigating conceptual metaphors. According to this approach, conceptual metaphors give rise to systems of conventional conceptual mappings, held in long-term memory, which may be motivated by image-schematic structure. If image schemas arise from bodily experience, then we may be able to explain conceptual metaphor on the basis that it maps rich and detailed structure from concrete domains of experience onto more abstract concepts and conceptual domains. We have seen several examples of this phenomenon already. Consider again example (9), which was first presented in Chapter 1.

This metaphor appears to relate the domains of QUANTITY and VERTICAL ELE VATION. In other words, we understand greater quantity in terms of increased height, and decreased quantity in terms of lesser height. Conceptual metaphor scholars like Lakoff and Johnson argue that this conventional pattern of conceptual mapping is directly grounded in ubiquitous everyday experience. For example, when we pour a liquid into a glass, there is a simultaneous increase in the height and quantity of the fluid. This is a typical example of the correlation between height and quantity. Similarly, if we put items onto a pile, an increase in height correlates with an increase in quantity. This experiential correlation between height and quantity, which we experience from an early age, has been claimed to motivate the conceptual metaphor MORE IS UP, also known as QUANTITY IS VERTICAL ELEVATION (see Chapter 9).