Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science
A brief history of embodiment in Cognitive Linguistics
Elaborations and extensions of the embodiment hypothesis
Over the ensuing twenty years, the notions of experientialism, embodiment, and a directionality to conceptual metaphor received much scrutiny, generated much controversy, and consequently received much elaboration. More systematic surveys undertaken during the mid-1980s at Berkeley and elsewhere showed that bodily source domains were prevalent not only for the semantics of English, but also for languages as distant from it as Japanese and Mixtec. However, it is equally important to note that the languages did vary cross-culturally as to which particular bodily source domains were used to understand a given target domain, and with respect to how these patterns were represented linguistically. With respect to historical semantic change, Sweetser (1990) has argued that the direction of such change is motivated by the embodiment hypothesis. For instance, she documented a directionality within Indo-European languages for metaphors such as KNOWING IS SEEING, arguing that the terms which came to be the ordinary ones for abstractions such as knowing were at an earlier time restricted to embodied perceptual capabilities, such as seeing, grasping, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. In a now standard example, she traces the transition of the Indo-European root *weid ‘see’ through the Greek eidon ‘to see’ and, in its perfective form oida ‘sight, know’, to the English terms idea, wit, and witness, which retain none of their visual sensibility to most native English speakers (Sweetser 1990: 23–48). By observing how a wide range of embodied perceptual terms systematically lose their perceptual connotations as they acquire their intellectual meaning, she proposed that there exists a large-scale temporal constraint on the directionality of semantic change.
In the preface to The Body in the Mind, Johnson (1987: xii–xiii) presented six converging bodies of evidence for the embodiment hypothesis understood as a directional constraint on meaning. This list included not only cross-cultural research on metaphor and historical semantic change but also work on prototypes in categorization, the framing of concepts, polysemy, and inferential patterns in metaphor. Near the same time, other research in Cognitive Linguistics (such as Langacker’s (1987) Cognitive Grammar) contributed to an increasing focus on the role of the body in shaping linguistic and conceptual structure generally, and not just within a thread of semantic theory. In work that also appeared that same year, Lakoff (1987) characterized the experientialism (or experiential realism) at the core of the embodiment hypothesis as including
everything that goes to make up the actual or potential experiences of either individual organisms or communities of organisms– not merely perception, motor movement, etc., but especially the internal genetically acquired makeup of the organism and the nature of its interactions in both its physical and social environments. (Lakoff 1987: xv)
Experiential realism, as Lakoff defined it, was to be in direct contrast with the traditional philosophical conception of meaningful thought and reason as the manipulation of symbols that correspond to an objective reality that is independent of the particular kind of embodiment of the organism. By 1987, the embodiment hypothesis had explicitly grown to become much more ambitious in scope than in its humbler origins as a generalization about the directionality of metaphors. Physiology, temporal development, and organism–environment interactions as well as linguistic evidence were explicitly expected to play a role in an increasingly broad theoretical hypothesis which purported to explain an ever-larger amount of linguistic phenomena.
