From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics

Front Cover
Beate Hampe, Joseph E. Grady
Walter de Gruyter, 2005 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 485 pages

The 1987 landmark publications by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson made image schema one of the cornerstone concepts of the emerging experientialist paradigm of Cognitive Linguistics, a framework founded upon the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and stressing the fundamentally embodied nature of meaning, imagination and reason - hence language. Conceived of as the pre-linguistic, dynamic and highly schematic gestalts arising directly from motor movement, object manipulation, and perceptual interaction, image schemas served to anchor abstract reasoning and imagination to sensori-motor patterns in the conceptual theory of metaphor.

Being itself informed by preceding crosslinguistic work on semantic primitives in the linguistic representations of spatial relations (carried out by L. Talmy, R. Langacker, and others), the notion has inspired a large amount of subsequent research and debate on diverse issues ranging from the meaning, structure and acquisition of natural languages to the embodied mind itself.

From Perception to Meaning is the first survey of current image-schema theory and offers a collection of original and innovative essays by leading scholars, many of whom have shaped the theory from the very beginning. The edition unites essays on major issues in recent research on image-schemas - from aspects of their definition and linguistic formalization, their psychological status and neural grounding to their role as semantic universals and primitives in language acquisition. The book will thus not only be welcomed by linguists of a cognitive orientation, but will prove relevant to philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in language, and indeed to anyone studying the embodied mind.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
Issues in image schema theory
12
The philosophical significance of image schemas
15
Refining a definition
35
From linguistic analysis to neural grounding
57
Implications for cognitive semantics
92
Image schemas in mind and brain
111
The psychological status of image schemas
113
Image schemas and beyond Expanded and alternative notions
283
Situated and compound image schemas
285
Whats in a schema? Bodily mimesis and the grounding of language
313
Image schemas vs Complex Primitives in crosscultural spatial cognition
343
New case studies on image schemas
366
Dynamic patterns of CONTAINMENT
369
Image schemas and verbal synaesthesia
395
Image schemas and gesture
420

III Image schemas and the transition to verbal thought
137
Image schemata in the brain
165
Image schemas in spatial cognition and language
197
The fundamental system of spatial schemas in language
198
On the semantic unity of over
235
Forcedynamic dimensions of rhetorical effect
443
Author index
475
Subject index
479
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