Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience

Gibbs, Raymond W.; Lima, Paula Lenz Costa; Françozo, Edson

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2003.10.009

Cited by 385 publications

(163 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…One finds detailed patches of correspondence, but no consistent mapping of relationships. Research into metonymy (Goossens 1995, Barcelona 2001) and embodiment (Gibbs, Lima & Francuzo 2004;Gibbs 2006) in the post-1980 cognitive tradition can explain these findings. The argument is frequently made that much metaphor is grounded in metonymy, which is often the result of embodied experience.…”

Section: The Corpus Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

Deignan

Cameron

2009

Cognitive Semiotics

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Cognitive metaphor theorists have identified a number of mappings that, it has been claimed, are both central to thinking and productive of linguistic metaphors. One of these is UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. In this article, we re-examine UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING using two sources of naturally occurring data. Our first source is the Oxford English Corpus: a two-billion-word corpus of authentic contemporary English texts, from which we extracted a 1,000-citation concordance of the lemma SEE. We analyzed this into major sense groups and identified the most frequent lexico-grammatical patterns. Our second source of data is transcribed spoken English from focus-group discussions. We analyzed this dataset, using detailed discourse analysis, to identify the meanings of SEE and its most frequent phraseologies. Both analyses lead us to conclude that SEE is, indeed, used to talk about understanding, as claimed by Conceptual Metaphor theorists, but that the metaphor usually describes difficulties with understanding another speaker's point of view or, more generally, the process of reaching an understanding: that is, it is used to talk about understanding or not understanding as processes, not states. Our findings are consistent with the construal of language and thought as a dynamic system.

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Section: The Corpus Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

Deignan

Cameron

2009

Cognitive Semiotics

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“…Some studies provide empirical and psychological support for the claim that metaphorical linguistic expressions are fuelled by preexisting patterns of thought or conceptual metaphors (Gibbs, 2011;Gibbs & O'Brian, 1990;Nayakk & Gibbs, 1990). Gibbs, Lima, & Francozo (2004, p. 1189) take the argument one step further and, through a survey of some American English and Brazilian Portuguese speakers, offer evidence that conceptual metaphors are, in turn, "fundamentally rooted in embodied action," as exemplified by the metaphorical conceptualization of desire in terms of huger (I am starved for his affection). While these observations have vast implications beyond the scope of the present study and involve causal and interactive relationships of metaphor, language, and behavior, they also encourage studies of limited scope with the goal of getting insights into the current thinking and behavior of individuals through their metaphors.…”

Section: A Taste Of Metaphor Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

EFL learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning

Farjami

2012

SSLLT

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In this paper, I will argue that awareness of images and metaphors held by foreign language learners about the nature of the target language and its learning can be of substantial value and provide teaching practitioners with useful insights about how to deal with various language learning problems. To elicit images which learners hold about foreign language learning, a questionnaire was given to 350 learners of English in different places in Iran. The questionnaire asked the respondents to provide images about learning a foreign language by using a sentence completion task: "Learning a foreign language is like . . ." The responses gained in 200 questionnaires were content-analyzed and the identified images and metaphors were summarized under more broad-ranging categories. The information that the metaphors and the resulting metaphorical categories provide and the theoretical interpretations which can plausibly be made are discussed in some detail and put in a cognitive-psychological perspective.Keywords: conceptual metaphor, foreign language learning, language learners' images, language learners' metaphors, learners' beliefs, metaphor analysisThe study of language learners' beliefs and thought processes has been of interest to researchers for several decades and has recently gathered increased momentum (e.g., Berry, 2004;Cotterall, 1999;Finkbeiner, 2003;Fortune, 2005;Hawkins, 1999;Liao, 2006; Svalberg, 2005). Direct questionnaires tapping into learners' beliefs about different dimensions of language learning (e.g., Horwitz,

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“…Finally, psycholinguistic studies suggest that hypothesis (4) might be true to some extent (Gibbs et al, 1997a). This work includes studies investigating people's mental imagery for conventional metaphors, including idioms and proverbs (Gibbs and O'Brien, 1990;Gibbs et al, 1997b), people's context-sensitive judgments about the figurative meanings of idioms in context (Nayak and Gibbs, 1990), people's immediate processing of idioms (Gibbs et al, 1997a), people's responses to questions about time (Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002;Gentner and Boroditsky, 2002), readers' understanding of metaphorical time expressions (McGlone and Harding, 1998), and studies looking at the embodied foundation for metaphoric meaning (Gibbs, 2006c;Gibbs et al, 2004. At the same time, Coulson (2001) describes several neuropsychological studies whose results are consistent with some of the claims of blending theory, particularly the idea that understanding metaphors demands various blending processes, which require cognitive effort.…”

Section: Pragmatics and Online Metaphor Usementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a linguist (Tendahl) and psychologist (Gibbs), we have found these alternative perspectives to be extremely useful in thinking about mind and language, most broadly, and in trying to understand the complexities of metaphoric language and thought. One of us has published many articles and books that provide empirical support for specific claims of both relevance theory (Gibbs, 1986Gibbs and Moise, 1997;Gibbs and Tendahl, 2006;Hamblin and Gibbs, 2003) and cognitive linguistics (Gibbs, 1992(Gibbs, , 1994(Gibbs, , 2006aGibbs and Colston, 1995;Gibbs et al, 2004). For these reasons, we are in a good position to fairly describe and criticize these different, yet complementary, positions on metaphor.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory

Tendahl

Gibbs

2008

Journal of Pragmatics

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155

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Contemporary theories of metaphor differ in many dimensions, including the discipline they originate from (e.g., linguistics, psychology, philosophy), and whether they are developed primarily within a cognitive or pragmatic theoretical framework. This article evaluates two directions of metaphor research within linguistics, cognitive linguistics and relevance theory, which both aim to capture essential aspects of the reason for metaphor, and how people ordinarily use and understand metaphor in daily life. We argue, contrary to most received opinion, that cognitive linguistics and relevance theory provide complementary perspectives on metaphor. Both theories offer important insights into the role of metaphor in cognition and language use, and suggest detailed hypotheses on metaphor understanding that surely are part of a comprehensive theory of metaphor. #

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Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience

Cited by 385 publications

References 31 publications

A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

EFL learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning

Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory

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