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Image schemas and abstract thought

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C6-P190

2025-12-20

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Image schemas and abstract thought

One of the most striking claims made by cognitive semanticists is that abstract thought has a bodily basis. In their influential research on conceptual metaphors, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) have argued that conceptual structure is in part organised in terms of a metaphor system, which is characterised by related sets of conventional associations or mappings between concrete and abstract domains. A domain in Conceptual Metaphor Theory is a body of knowledge that organises related concepts. The importance of image schemas is that they can provide the concrete basis for these metaphoric mappings. We have seen some examples like this in earlier chapters: for example, recall our discussion in Chapter 5 of the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE CONTAINERS. Let’s consider one more example.

Consider the image schema OBJECT. This image schema is based on our everyday interaction with concrete objects like desks, chairs, tables, cars and so on. The image schema is a schematic representation emerging from embodied experience, which generalises over what is common to objects: for example, that they have physical attributes such as colour, weight and shape, that they occupy a particular bounded region of space, and so forth. This image schema can be ‘mapped onto’ an abstract entity like ‘inflation’, which lacks these physical properties. The consequence of this metaphoric mapping is that we now understand an abstract entity like ‘inflation’ in terms of a physical object. This is illustrated by the examples in (10).

Notice that it is only by understanding ‘inflation’ in terms of something with physical attributes that we can quantify it and talk about its effects. Thus image schemas which relate to and derive ultimately from pre-conceptual embodied experience can serve to structure more abstract entities such as inflation. We return to a detailed investigation of conceptual metaphor in Chapter 9.