Embodied cognition
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P45
2025-11-30
24
Embodied cognition
The fact that our experience is embodied – that is, structured in part by the nature of the bodies we have and by our neurological organisation – has con sequences for cognition. In other words, the concepts we have access to and the nature of the ‘reality’ we think and talk about are a function of our embodiment: we can only talk about what we can perceive and conceive, and the things that we can perceive and conceive derive from embodied experience. From this point of view, the human mind must bear the imprint of embodied experience.
In his now classic 1987 book, The Body in the Mind, Mark Johnson proposes that one way in which embodied experience manifests itself at the cognitive level is in terms of image schemas (see Chapter 6). These are rudimentary concepts like CONTACT, CONTAINER and BALANCE, which are meaningful because they derive from and are linked to human pre-conceptual experience: experience of the world directly mediated and structured by the human body. These image-schematic concepts are not disembodied abstractions, but derive their substance, in large measure, from the sensory-perceptual experiences that give rise to them in the first place. Lakoff (1987, 1990, 1993) and Johnson (1987) have argued that embodied concepts of this kind can be systematically extended to provide more abstract concepts and conceptual domains with structure. This process is called conceptual projection. For example, they argue that conceptual metaphor (which we discussed briefly above and to which we return in detail in Chapter 9) is a form of conceptual projection. According to this view, the reason we can talk about being in states like love or trouble (29) is because abstract concepts like LOVE are structured and therefore understood by virtue of the fundamental concept CONTAINER. In this way, embodied experience serves to structure more complex concepts and ideas.
The developmental psychologist Jean Mandler (e.g. 1992, 1996, 2004) has made a number of proposals concerning how image schemas might arise from embodied experience. Starting at an early age, and certainly by two months, infants attend to objects and spatial displays in their environment. Mandler suggests that by attending closely to such spatial experiences, children are able to abstract across similar kinds of experiences, finding meaningful patterns in the process. For instance, the CONTAINER image schema is more than simply a spatio-geometric representation. It is a ‘theory’ about a particular kind of configuration in which one entity is supported by another entity that contains it. In other words, the CONTAINER schema is meaningful because containers are meaningful in our everyday experience. Consider the spatial scene described in (30).
It is for this reason that the English preposition in can be used in scenes that are non-spatial in nature, like the examples in (29). It is precisely because containers constrain activity that it makes sense to conceptualise POWER and all-encompassing states like LOVE or CRISIS in terms of CONTAINMENT. Mandler (2004) describes this process of forming image schemas in terms of a redescription of spatial experience via a process she labels perceptual meaning analysis. As she puts it, ‘[O]ne of the foundations of the conceptualizing capacity is the image schema, in which spatial structure is mapped into conceptual structure’ (Mandler 1992: 591). She further suggests that ‘Basic, recurrent experiences with the world form the bedrock of the child’s semantic architecture, which is already established well before the child begins producing language’ (Mandler 1992: 597). In other words, it is experience, meaningful to us by virtue of our embodiment, that forms the basis of many of our most fundamental concepts.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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