A Review of Studies Supporting Metaphorical Embodiment

Abstract

This paper presents a review of studies that have provided evidence supporting metaphorical embodiment. These studies are divided into three categories of behavioral, neuroimaging, and corpus studies. After summing up the findings of these studies, it is concluded that metaphorical embodiment is supported by these three lines of research. This is followed by a review of a number of studies that have measured sensorimotor and action effector strengths of various concepts. Then, the idea of sensorimotor and action effector strength of concepts is linked to metaphorical embodiment to present the main idea of the paper. Based on the findings of studies that have measured sensorimotor and action effector strengths of concepts, it is suggested that the degree of involvement of sensorimotor systems in mental simulation of metaphoric actions may not be at the same level in all metaphors. It depends on the sensorimotor strength of the base of the metaphor in various modalities. If the base of a metaphor has a high degree of perceptual strength in a certain modality, that modality plays the most important role in the processing of that metaphor, while other modalities take less important roles. In other words, depending on the sensorimotor strengths of the base of a metaphor in various modalities, those modalities have various levels of importance in the processing of that metaphor. If the base of the metaphor is weak in all modalities, modal resources can come into play to process that metaphor.

Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought

“…There is significant empirical support for embodied metaphor theory, coming from action-sentence compatibility studies, eye-tracking studies, hand-prime studies, gesture-inlearning studies, and neuroimaging studies on sensorimotor activation during metaphor processing and mental imagery processing [39]. As mentioned, this literature supports the idea that even abstract, complex metaphors are compositions of simpler metaphors.…”

“…The fundamentally metaphorical nature of thought in general, and spontaneous thought in particular, is a central finding of embodied cognition research. Rather than view all cognition as disembodied sign manipulations emerging solely in response to verbal instruction or cultural observation, cognitive linguists challenged the older cognitive paradigm using a number of crucial observations of real-world, everyday language [1,16,39]. The literature of embodied cognition and cognitive linguistics, in fact, shows that much of our thought can be described not in meaningless signs but in terms of embodied metaphors, which are themselves defined as: "frame-to-frame mappings across conceptual domains.…”

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“…Rather than view all cognition as disembodied sign manipulations, cognitive linguists challenged the classic paradigm. They did so using a number of crucial observations of realworld, everyday language (reviewed in Lakoff, 2012; see also Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999and Khatin-Zadeh et al, 2023, for example, the way basic level categories and spatial relations across many languages require universal primitives that reference the human body (Langacker, 2008).…”

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“…Recently, a growing body of studies have investigated the question of the embodiment of action metaphor processing by comparing metaphoric action sentences with non-metaphoric ones, and yielded mixed findings (for an overview, see Khatin-Zadeh et al, 2023 ). Some of the studies have demonstrated the activation of the sensorimotor systems during action metaphor comprehensions ( Desai et al, 2011 , 2013 ; Boulenger et al, 2012 ; Lauro et al, 2013 ; Schuil et al, 2013 ; Fernandino et al, 2016 ; Martin, 2016 ; Johari et al, 2021 ).…”