Lesson plan

Image schema

An image schema (both schemas and schemata are used as plural forms) is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition, image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady. In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. Learned in early infancy they are often described as spatiotemporal relationships that enable actions and describe characteristics of the environment. They exist both as static and dynamic version, describing both states and processes, compare Containment vs. Going_In/Out, and they are learned from all sensorimodalities.…

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Article summary

An image schema (both schemas and schemata are used as plural forms) is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition, image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady. In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. Learned in early infancy they are often described as spatiotemporal relationships that enable actions and describe characteristics of the environment. They exist both as static and dynamic version, describing both states and processes, compare Containment vs. Going_In/Out, and they are learned from all sensorimodalities.…

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Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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