Language and Embodiment

- This paper illustrates the relationship between language and embodiment through evidence of the English and Vietnamese language.
- One of the central theses of CL is the embodiment of language.
- The term embodiment has attracted a huge amount of attention in the school of cognitive linguistics.
- The embodiment thesis is “central to cognitive semantics” (Shina and Lopéz,) [1] And embodiment has been serving as one of the most important tenets in cognitive linguistics.
- This paper aims at presenting an understanding of the notion of embodiment and its relationship with language analysis, thus hopefully producing implication for the task of language teaching and learning with a new perspective and methodology.
- We perceive things in the world differently.
- As a result, language used by us to describe the world must undergo changes through speaker’s or writer’s perception, resulting in a fact that language is not the “description of the real word (nor any possible world), but rather a description of human perception of reality” (Janda) [3]..
- Before babies start to have their so-called “concepts”, they have gone through experience of the real world - the reality.
- Evan [2] states that “the concepts we have access to and the nature of the “reality” we think and talk about are a function of embodiment: we can only talk about what we can perceive and conceive, and the things that we can perceive and conceive derive from embodied experience”..
- Johnson [4] developed a theory about image schemas which are “relatively abstract conceptual representations that arise directly from our everyday interaction with and observation of the world around us” (Evan) [2].
- One of the classis examples of image schema is CONTAINER.
- daze out of the bedroom.
- Regarding the relationship between embodiment and language, Zlatev [7] states that there are three major unresolved issues in the sciences of the mind.
- And the third mentions the underestimation of the role of consciousness in many embodiment theories.
- Despite slightly different ideas about embodiment, there is a high scale of agreement of the central role of embodiment in cognitive linguistics [1]..
- Also, one of the four central assumptions of cognitive semantics is about the embodied cognition thesis, i.e.
- The perception then becomes our conceptions of the perceived world, which remains in our mind as concepts.
- quite the opposite: they are activated and motivated directly in the daily experience in our life: in our bodily, social, physical, or social experiences (c.f.
- thus, their perception about the world differs, resulting in the difference in their description of what they experience.
- He further indicates that “the projection of in-out orientation onto inanimate objects is already a first move beyond the prototypical case of my bodily movement”..
- In everyday language, we often see a direct reflection of the embodied nature onto object names.
- In English, we speak of the hands of a clock, the mouth of a river, and the foot of a hill.
- The heart is perhaps one of the most important organs in our body, which influences the way we think or act.
- Bodily experience plays a crucial role not only in expressing people’s mind, but also in people’s understanding of the language they hear or read.
- Take an example of the following sentence from the song “Everybody is free to wear Sunscreen” by Baz Luhrman [12]..
- Listeners/readers of little or no knowledge of the culture to which the sentence refers, would find the sentence hard enough to understand, even impossible to get what the singer really means.
- Similarly, how “soft” life is in Northern America would pose a problem to those listeners of the song who have never witnessed or experienced life in a peaceful and vast country like Northern California.
- Therefore, in order to understand the metaphor (or the implicit meaning) of the sentence, listeners must at least possess a grasp of the literary meaning of the sentence, which can only be achieved by bodily experience.
- Since driving laws/rules slightly vary in different countries, we do not always understand the rules unless we are living in the culture of destination country or at least equipped with a basic knowledge of it.
- Given that the readers/listeners live in Australia where everyone is aware of the driving rules, they would find no difficulties in understanding the conversation between Tom and John.
- This means that only by being equipped by the knowledge of the rules can the readers/listeners of the conversation catch the meaning of interlocutor in the language exchange above.
- This could be, in contrast, a completely incomprehensible chunk of language if the listeners have little or no knowledge of the driving rules in Australia.
- Most farmers used to, some now still do, keep the practice of using buffalos or oxen to pull the plough - an act to turn over the upper layer of the soil, bringing fresher nutrients to the surface.
- And the most likely person to take the job would be little kids, a job often considered boring and uninteresting Equipped with this experience, listeners of the phrase “ai bảo chăn trâu là khổ.
- who says taking care of buffalos is a hard job - may visualize the picture of the job, understanding both the hardship and possible enjoyment of the task.
- On the contrary, people being raised in “white-collar” families would struggle to grasp the meanings of the phrase literarily and figuratively.
- This is due to listener’s experience which plays an essential part in their comprehension of the language being exposed to them.
- And taxes would cost half or more of the income made from those pieces of land.
- These expressions actually display their perception on the given event, not the description of the real world.
- Embodiment plays a crucial role in our understanding of the language to which we are exposed.
- Working with language, both as learners and teachers, requires thorough understanding of the embodiment thesis, which is necessary for successes language learning and teaching.
- An undeniable assumption made by frame semantics is that in order to understand the meanings of the word(s) of a language, one must have in mind the knowledge of conceptual structures, or semantic frames, that set the motivation and background for their (the words’) existence and their use in the context or discourse.
- The comprehension and the production of the target language lie in “embodied processes whose goal is the creation and extraction of embodied meanings” [15].
- Language teachers should be aware of the language they use when they introduce it to their learners.
- Language learners would not be able to comprehend the meanings of the target language unless they possess a frame, i.e.
- To achieve the goal of providing language learners of a “frame”, language teachers should be able to build a net work of the language in their lesson planning so that there is a logical correlation between the exposed language and their learners’ knowledge, i.e.
- Language teachers should be able to clarify the language, especially examples, in textbooks, which often cause difficulties for learners, not by the individual meanings of the words in isolation, but the frame semantics of those words as a whole.
- For example, in the book by Soars [16] entitled New Headway, which is a popular textbook in language centers in Vietnam, we would find the sentence “How would you like your tea.
- It is no doubt that in order to comprehend the sentence, one must be able to understand the practice of tea drinking of English people, which is very much different from that of Vietnamese, in terms of the ritual and the materials to make tea.
- otherwise, a misleading interpretation of the language will be likely to happen.
- It is now obvious that the task of either learning, teaching, or translating language is much of the job that requires the task takers lot of embodied knowledge or experience which can only acquired through training and definitely real life experience.
- Kristine, Language, culture, and the embodiment of spatial cognition, In Cognitive Linguistics .
- Johnson, The Body in the Mind.
- Lakoff, The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987..
- Jeuniaux, How fundamental is embodiment to language comprehension? Constrains on embodied cognition, Paper presented in Cognitive Science Conference Proceedings - 30th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Washington DC 2008..
- Fillmore, Frame Semantics, In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, ed