从体验认知视角看身体、文化与隐喻之关系

Investigating the Relationship between Body, Culture and Metaphor from the Perspective of Embodied Cognition

体验认知强调身体经验在人类认知过程中起着主要作用,主张概念隐喻本质上基于身体经验。既然人类拥有基本相同的身体结构,具有许多共同的身体经验和身体功能,那么不同语言应该存在跨越界线的共同概念隐喻。基于此,本文试图从体验认知视角出发,通过语言实例论证身体、文化与隐喻之间的循环三角关系。具体来说,身体、文化与隐喻三者相互制约、相互影响:概念隐喻基于身体经验,身体经验影响隐喻的概念映射,而概念映射又受到文化的制约;文化,尤其是文化模式,一方面需要隐喻来构建,另一方面对隐喻化过程中身体的作用进行解释和筛选。

This paper attempts to probe into the relationship between body, culture and metaphor in the light of the embodied cognition theory,which maintains that human body and bodily experiences play a core role in human cognition,and that metaphors with conceptual structures are basically derived from human bodily experiences. Since human beings all share a basic body structure,and have many common bodily experiences, it follows that different languages should have parallel conceptual metaphors across their boundaries. The question asked in the paper is what role culture plays in this theory. The author tries to argue,by using lots of linguistic data,that there may exist a circular triangle relationship between metaphor,body and culture. That is,conceptual metaphors are usually grounded in bodily experiences,which,in turn,affect metaphors’ conceptual mappings,which are restricted by cultural models;cultural models,however,filter and explain functions of bodily experiences in their metaphorization,on one hand;and cultural models themselves are very often structured by conceptual metaphors on the other hand. As such,any one of the three constraining the next one will affect the third one as well.