Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 24:2 (2017) ► pp.164–185

Embodied concept mapping

Blending structure-mapping and embodiment theories

| University of Adelaide
| Chabahar Maritime University
| University of Ottawa
| Stockholm University
| University of St. Francis
Metaphors are cognitive and linguistic tools that allow reasoning. They enable the understanding of abstract domains via elements borrowed from concrete ones. The underlying mechanism in metaphorical mapping is the manipulation of concepts. This article proposes another view on what concepts are and their role in metaphor and reasoning. That is, based on current neuroscientific and behavioural evidence, it is argued that concepts are grounded in perceptual and motor experience with physical and social environments. This definition of concepts is then embedded in the Structure-Mapping Theory (SMT), a model for metaphorical processing and reasoning. The blended view of structure-mapping and embodied cognition offers an insight into the processes through which the target domain of a metaphor is embodied or realised in terms of its base domain. The implications of the proposed embodied SMT model are then discussed and future topics of investigation are outlined.
Keywords: embodied cognition, metaphor, language, metaphorical mapping, structure-mapping, concepts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Concepts, metaphors, and analogical thinking
  • 3.Structure-Mapping Theory and the embodied cognition framework
  • 4.Towards an embodied SMT
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17013.mar
References (88)
References
Allen, Micah G. & Karl J. Friston. 2016. From cognitivism to autopoiesis: Towards a computational framework for the embodied mind. Synthese 195(6): 2459–2482. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2012. The human conceptual system. In Michael J. Spivey, Ken McRae & Marc F. Joanisse (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics, 239–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59(1). 617–645. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borghi, Annan M. 2005. Object concepts and action. In Diane Pecher & Rolf A. Zwaan (eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking, 8–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borghi, Anna, Ferdinand Binkofski, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Felice Cimatti, Claudia Scorolli & Luca Tummolini. 2017. The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin 143(3). 263–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowdle, Brian F. & Dedre Gentner. 2005. The career of metaphor. Psychological Review 1121. 193–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc, Amy Beth Warriner & Victor Kuperman. 2014. Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 46(3). 904–911. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butz, Martin V. 2016. Toward a unified sub-symbolic computational theory of cognition. Frontiers in Psychology 7(925). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cevasco, Jazmin & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2013. The importance of studying the role of prosody in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología 45(1). 21–33.Google Scholar
Connell, Louise & Dermot Lynott. 2012. Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability. Cognition 125(3). 452–465. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corballis, Michael C. 2017. Language evolution: A changing perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21(4). 229–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D’Angiulli, Amedeo, Gordon Griffiths & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2015. Neural correlates of visualizations of concrete and abstract words in preschool children: A developmental embodied approach. Frontiers in Psychology 6(856). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Cristoph & Ikuma Adachi. 2013. Conceptual metaphorical mapping in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). eLife, 21:e00932. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Desai, Rutvik H., Jeffery R. Binder, Lisa L. Conant, Quintino R. Mano & Mark S. Seidenberg. 2011. The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23(9). 2376–2386. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eskine, Kendall J., Natalie A. Kacinik & Jesse J. Prinz. 2011. A bad taste in the mouth: Gustatory disgust influences moral judgment. Psychological Science 22(3). 295–299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, Nicholas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5). 472–492. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Falkenhainer, Brian, Kenneth D. Forbus & Dedre Gentner. 1989. The structure-mapping engine: An algorithm and examples. Artificial Intelligence 411. 1–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2001. Conceptual blending and analogy. In Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, & Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science, 255–285. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles & George Lakoff. 2013. On metaphor and blending. Cognitive Semiotics 5(1–2). 393–399.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 1998. Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science 22(2), 133–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fedorenko, Evelina & Rosemary Varley. 2016. Language and thought are not the same thing: Evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1369(1). 132–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Jerome & Srinivas Narayanan. 2004. Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language. Brain and Language 89(2). 385–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freund, Patrick, Karl Friston, Allen J. Thompson, Klaas E. Stephan, John Ashburner, Dominik R. Bach, Zoltan Nagy, Gunther Helms, Bogdan Draganski, Siawoosh Mohammadi, Martin E. Schwab, Armin Curt & Nikaulas Weiskopf. 2016. Embodied neurology: An integrative framework for neurological disorders. Brain 139(6). 1855–1861. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio. 2007. Before and below ‘theory of mind’: Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B, 362(1480). 659–669. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio & George Lakoff. 2005. The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22(3). 455–479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gapenne, Olivier. 2014. The co-constitution of the self and the world: Action and proprioceptive coupling. Frontiers in Psychology 5(594). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geake, John G. & Peter C. Hansen. 2010. Functional neural correlates of fluid and crystallized analogizing. NeuroImage 491. 3489–3497. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentner, Dedre. 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7(2). 155–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1988. Metaphor as structure mapping: The relational shift. Child Development 591. 47–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentner, Dedre, Brian F. Bowdle, Philip Wolff & Consuelo Boronat. 2001. Metaphor is like analogy. In Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak & Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science, 199–253. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W. 1996. Why many concepts are metaphorical. Cognition 61(3). 309–319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W. & Herbert L. Colston. 2012. Interpreting Figurative Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W. 2013. The real complexities of psycholinguistic research on metaphor. Language Sciences 401. 45–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, Rachel. 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 8(3). 183–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. Literal vs. figurative meaning: Different or equal. Journal of Pragmatics 341. 457–486. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glucksberg, Sam. 2003. The psycholinguistics of metaphor. Trends in Cognitive Science 71. 92–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Harnad, Steven. 1990. The symbol grounding problem. Physica D 42(1–3). 335–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine & Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2–3). 61–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huth, Alexander G., Wendy A. de Heer, Thomas L. Griffiths, Fredric E. Theunissen & Jack L. Gallant. 2016. Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile the human cerebral cortex. Nature 5321. 453–458. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1976. Towards an explanatory semantic representation. Linguistic Inquiry 7(1). 89–150.Google Scholar
Jamrozik, Aanja, Marguerite McQuire, Eileen R. Cardillo & Anjan Chatterjee. 2016. Metaphors: Bridging embodiment to abstraction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 1080–1089. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid & Sedigheh Vhadat. 2015. Abstract and concrete representations in structure-mapping and class-inclusion. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 2(2). 349–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Hassan Banaruee, Hooshang Khoshsima & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2017. The role of motion concepts in understanding non-motion concepts. Behavioral Sciences 7(4). 84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kousta, Sravroula-Thaleia, Gabriella Vigliocco, David Vinson & Elena Del Campo. 2011. The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 140(1). 14–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lacey, Simon, Randall Stilla & Krishnankutty Sathian. 2012. Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex. Brain & Language 120(3). 416–421. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2014. Mapping the brain’s metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8(958). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4(2). 195–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1986. An introduction to cognitive grammar. Cognitive Science 101. 1–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lebois, Lauren A., Christin Wilson‐Mendenhall & Laurence W. Barsalou. 2015. Are automatic conceptual cores the gold standard of semantic processing? The context-dependence of spatial meaning in grounded congruency effects. Cognitive Science 391. 1764–1801. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leshinskaya, Anna & Alfonso Caramazza. 2016. For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 991–1001. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Fengying, Xioyan Guo, Lei Zhu, Zhiliang Yang & Zoltan Dienes. 2013. Implicit learning of mappings between forms and metaphorical meanings. Consciousness and Cognition 22(1). 174–183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lycan, William G. 2000. Philosophy of language: A contemporary introduction. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Malt, Barbara C. & Asifa Majid. 2013. How thought is mapped into words. WIREs Cognitive Science 4(6). 583–597. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marks, Lawrence E. 1996. On perceptual metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11(1). 39–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando. 2007. Nuevos avances en el estudio científico de la comprensión de textos. Universitas Psychologica 6(2). 331–343.Google Scholar
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando & Jazmin Cevasco. 2014. Text comprehension as a problem solving situation. Universitas Psychologica 13(2). 725–743. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando, Juan C. Correa, Gopal Sakarkar, Giang Ngo, Susana Ruiz-Fernández, Natalie Butcher & Yuki Yamada. 2017. Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: A cross-linguistic study. Psychological Research 81(4). 750–763. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, Alex. 2016. GRAPES – Grounding representations in action, perception and emotion systems: How object properties and categories are represented in the human brain. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 979–990. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mathôt, Sebastian, Jonathan Grainger & Kristof Strijkers. 2017. Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness. Psychological Science 28(8). 1116–1124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGlone, Matthew & Deanna Manfredi. 2001. Topic-vehicle interaction in metaphor comprehension. Memory & Cognition 291. 1209–1219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mehl, Matthias R., Charles R. Raison, Thaddeus W. Pace, Jesusa M. G. Arevalo & Steve W. Cole. 2017. Natural language indicators of differential gene regulation in the human immune system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(47). 12554–12559. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mishra, Ramesh K. & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2010. On the mental representations originating during the interaction between language and vision. Cognitive Processing 11(4). 295–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Münte, Thomas F., Kolja Schiltz & Marta Kutas. 1998. When temporal order belies conceptual order. Nature 3951. 71–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nikolić, Danko. 2009. Is synaesthesia actually ideaesthesia? An inquiry into the nature of the phenomenon. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Synaesthesia, Science & Art, 26–29.Google Scholar
Ortony, Andrew. 1979. Metaphor, language, and thought. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Poyatos, Fernando. 1984. The multichannel reality of discourse: Language-paralanguage-kinesics and the totality of communicative systems. Language Sciences 6(2). 307–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prat, Chantel S., Robert A. Mason & Marcel A. Just. 2012. An fMRI investigation of analogical mapping in metaphor comprehension: The influence of context and individual cognitive capacities on processing demands. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 38(2). 282–294.Google Scholar
Raposo, Aan, Helen Moss, Emanuel A. Stamatakis & Loraine K. Tyler. 2009. Modulation of motor and premotor cortices by actions, action words, and action sentences. Neuropsychologia 47(2). 388–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Gwenda & Carol Seger. 2009. Neural correlates of metaphor processing: The roles of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty. Brain and Cognition 711. 375–386. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sijtsma, Klaas. 2015. Playing with data – Or how to discourage questionable research practices and stimulate researchers to do things right. Psychometrika 81(1). 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Linda B. & Eliana Colunga. 2012. Developing categories and concepts. In Michael J. Spivey, Ken McRae & Marc F. Joanisse (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics, 283–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
. 2008. A deflationary account of metaphors. In Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (ed.), Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 84–105. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tourangeau, Roger & Robert J. Sternberg. 1981. Aptness in metaphor. Cognitive Psychology 131. 27–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tremblay, Pascale & Anthony S. Dick. 2016. Broca and Wernicke are dead, or moving past the classic model of language neurobiology. Brain and Language 1621. 60–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Velasco, Carlos, Alejandro Salgado-Montejo, Andrew J. Elliot, Andy T. Woods, Jorge Alvarado & Charles Spence. 2016. The shapes associated with approach/avoidance words. Motivation and Emotion 40(5). 689–702. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vélez, Jorge I. & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2016. Los secretos de Cien Años de Soledad: Una aproximación estilométrica para la investigación en Psicolingüística. Revista Colombiana de Psicología 25(2). 265–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deidre & Robyn Carston. 2006. Metaphor, relevance and the emergent property issue. Mind and Language 211. 404–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolff, Philip & Dedre Gentner. 2000. Evidence for role-neutral initial processing of metaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 261. 529–541.Google Scholar
. 2011. Structure‐mapping in metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science 35(8). 1456–1488. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Alfred N. 1978. Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Xue, Jin, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos & Xuna Pei. 2015. The linguistic context effects on the processing of body-object interaction words: An ERP study on second language learners. Brain Research 16131. 37–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zeman, Adam, Michaela Dewar & Sergio Della Sala. 2015. Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex 731. 378–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhong, Chen-Bo & Geoffrey J. Leonardelli. 2008. Cold and lonely: Does social exclusion literally feel cold? Psychological Science 19(9). 838–842. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhong, Chen-Bo & Katie Liljenquist. 2006. Wash away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science 313(5792). 1451–1452. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (12)

Cited by 12 other publications

Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Jiehui Hu & Danyal Farsani
2024. Motor strength as a feature of concepts and visual representations. Frontiers in Psychology 15 DOI logo
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Zahra Eskandari, Florencia Reali, Hassan Banaruee & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2023. Are metaphorical classes essentially abstract?. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 10:1 ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Khatin‐Zadeh, Omid & Babak Yazdani‐Fazlabadi
2023. Two Mechanisms for Understanding Mathematical Concepts in Terms of Fictive Motions. Mind, Brain, and Education 17:2 ► pp. 86 ff. DOI logo
Wu, Xiangci, Huibin Jia & Enguo Wang
2023. The neurophysiological mechanism of valence-space congruency effect: evidence from spatial Stroop task and event-related EEG features. Cognitive Neurodynamics 17:4 ► pp. 855 ff. DOI logo
Oker, A.
2022. Embodied social cognition investigated with virtual agents: The infinite loop between social brain and virtual reality. Frontiers in Virtual Reality 3 DOI logo
Siemens, George, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, Florence Gabriel, Kelsey Medeiros, Rebecca Marrone, Srecko Joksimovic & Maarten de Laat
2022. Human and artificial cognition. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence 3 ► pp. 100107 ff. DOI logo
Salas-Herrera, José Luis, Mabel Urrutia Martínez, Roberto Melipillan Araneda & Mónica Veliz De Vos
2021. Comprensión de oraciones de esfuerzo en jóvenes y adultos mayores desde una perspectiva corpórea. Universitas Psychologica 19 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Zhao, Tianyang, Yanli Huang, Donggui Chen, Lu Jiao, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, Ruiming Wang & Jiushu Xie
2020. The modality switching costs of Chinese–English bilinguals in the processing of L1 and L2. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73:3 ► pp. 396 ff. DOI logo
Hong, Bao, Lu Zhang & Hongri Sun
2019. Measurement of the Vertical Spatial Metaphor of Power Concepts Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Hassan Banaruee, Zahra Eskandari & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2019. Isomorphism: Abstract and Concrete Representations. Activitas Nervosa Superior 61:3 ► pp. 152 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Yiguang, Jun Yin & Junying Liang
2019. Why Smoggy Days Suppress Our Mood: Automatic Association Between Clarity and Valence. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando, Artin Arshamian, Carlos Tirado, Raydonal Ospina & Maria Larsson
2019. The Allocation of Valenced Percepts Onto 3D Space. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.