The Significance of Image Schema in Embodied Cognition

As a recurring pattern of sensory-motor-affective experience, image schema is not only a concept discussed in linguistics and psychology, but also a significant one in the study of embodied cognition. Through analyzing the features of image schema considered by the authors as embodiment, recessiveness, sedimentation, logicality, scientificity, and dependency to cognitive metaphors and reviewing the definition of embodied cognition, the paper argues that image schema is an integration of bodily property and mental property, and accordingly a core and inseparable concept of embodied cognition by bridging body and mind. Image schema can help to explain how abstraction and inference generate from body-environment interactions, thus making the theory of embodied cognition more persuasive and reliable.

STRAIGHT Image Schema and Its Metaphorical Extensions:A Contrastive Study between Chinese and English

This paper investigates STRAIGHT image schema and its metaphorical extensions in Chinese and English in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics.Our central goal is to highlight the important role of embodied and cultural elements on the meaning formation.By observing the corpus data,we find three common variations both in Chinese and English,namely,STRAIGHT-PATH,STRAIGHT-LINK,STRAIGHT-OBJECT,and one characterized variation in Chinese,STRAIGHT-SCALE.The ratio of metaphorical usage of zhi in Chinese is higher than that of straight in English while straight enjoys a wider metaphorical extension than zhi.The findings suggest that although bodily experience serves as the general cognitive basis for the formation of image schema and its metaphorical extensions,cultural elements contribute to the language-specific preference.

A Cognitive Study of “Head” Metaphors in English and Chinese

In point of cognitive view,metaphor is not only an ornamental devices used in rhetorical style,but also a kind of powerful cogni-tive tools for our conceptualization of the world and a thinking way of humanity.Human beings' cognition rule determines that humanbody and organs are the basis of human experience.People know the objective world through the metaphorical cognition of human bodyinitially,and the human-body metaphor is the most general way of thinking for the primitive people.Head is considered an importantpart of human body and head behaves abundant metaphor properties.Based on the English and Chinese corpus,this paper has made acontrastive study on the metaphoric features of expressions involving the Chinese"Tou"and English"Head",throughing light on similar-ities and differences in metaphorical construction and operation mechanism.

Study on Polysemy of Prepositions from the Perspective of Cognitive Semantics——a Case Study of Preposition On and Over

Prepositions in English language have the characteristics of polysemy,and their semantics meanings have significant abstract features.Based on the perspective of cognition and taking on and over as examples,this thesis uses the transformation of image schema and its metaphorical projection to provide an explanation for the polysemy of prepositions.In-depth exploration of the polysemy of English prepositions aims to further interpret the internal cognitive system generated by specific meanings,and help learners to fully grasp the extension of the meaning of prepositions.

Analysis the Semantic Extension of Preposition “in” from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

English preposition is flexible word with various meaning and preposition"in"is a high-frequent word used widely in English expression. As we know, there are about 70% English sentences are metaphors, and preposition is used frequently as the backbone of metaphorical expression. Therefore, the preposition cognitive interpretation is an effective way to understand the semantic extension of preposition. This article mainly analysis the prototypical meaning and the image schema of preposition "in"and discusses the mapping process from the spatial domain to the other cognitive domain. Through analysis the metaphor semantic extension process, we might get a better understanding of it.

Metaphorical Explanations for Misuse of the English Preposition IN by CELs:A Corpus Analysis

There exist differences between the usages of prepositions in English and Chinese, not only for the different cultural backgrounds, but for the different cognitive models. The use of English prepositions is a great challenge for Chinese English learners (CELs). This essay discusses the misuse of the English spatial preposition IN by CELs, using the data collected from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) against other corpora such as BNC, FLOB, FROWN as reference corpora. The statistical data, such as Frequency and Type/Token Ratio (TTR) of IN, shows that the overuse of IN is typical for Chinese English learners, and it also offers a reasonable explanation for the misuse of IN using the image schema in cognitive metaphor theory (CMT). The polysemy of the spatial preposition IN can be divided into different image schemas. Chinese English learners can avoid preposition misuse with the help of image-schemas.