Book review

From Perception to Meaning

Hampe, Beate (ed.) 2005. From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Reviewed by Ludwig Johnson, independent scholar

As is generally acknowledged, the term image schema first appeared in Talmy (1983), Johnson (1987), and Lakoff (1987), and was used as a notion to account for the embodied origins of human language and cognition. In her introduction to the volume under review, Beate Hampe points out that image schemas were originally characterized as directly meaningful, pre-conceptual, highly schematic, continuous and analogous, and internally structured. In the past two decades, image schemas have proven to be a crucial and fundamental concept in cognitive linguistics. They are useful in explanations of various linguistic and non-linguistic issues, in the areas of lexical semantics and inference structure in particular. However, despite all this, different scholars entertain different views on how to understand and define image schemas, and there are still many fundamental questions awaiting adequate exploration. The major goal of this collection of papers is, instead of offering a unified account of image schema theory, to bring together some of the major ideas on image schemas in order to see how the divergent approaches contribute to a deeper understanding.

This volume consists of five sections. Part 1 focuses on theoretical issues in image schema theory. In "The philosophical significance of image schemas", Mark Johnson touches upon the origin, identification of image schemas and how they help to solve the embodied meaning problem. He credits image schema analysis with its important "contribution to a developing a theory of the bodily basis of conceptualization and reasoning" (p. 27) and concludes that the philosophical significance of image schemas "lies in the way they bind together body and mind, inner and outer, and thought and feeling" (p. 32). In "Image schemas and perception: Refining a definition", Joseph E. Grady asks the following questions: How schematic are image schemas? What content do they represent? To him, image schemas are best understood as "mental representations of fundamental units of sensory experience" (p. 44). In their contribution "Image schemas: From linguistic analysis to neural grounding", Ellen Dodge and George Lakoff argue that a better understanding of image schemas can be made possible by combining linguistic analysis with findings of neuroscience. Part 1 ends with Timothy C. Clausner's discussion of two paradoxes of image schemas and their implications for cognitive semantics.

Part 2, entitled "Image schemas in mind and brain", opens with an account of the psychological reality of image schemas by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., who argues for viewing image schemas as "emergent properties of human self-organizing systems that are continually recreated and re-experienced during cognitive and perceptual activity" (p. 132). In "How to build a baby: IIII. Image schemas and the transition to verbal thought", Jean M. Mandler describes how image-schema conceptualizations underlie children's learning of spatial relational language. In "Image schemata in the brain", Tim Rohrer provides evidence that image schemata represented in the same cortical areas already known to map sensorimotor activity make semantic understanding possible.

Part 3 addresses the importance of image schemas to spatial language and cognition. Leonard Talmy proposes a comprehensive system of spatial schemas in across different languages, illustrating its key features at both componential and composite levels. Paul D. Deane presents a detailed analysis of the multimodal spatial representation of the English preposition "over" in an attempt to explore ways to link spatial language and the neuropsychology of spatial cognition and to see how an image-based view of meaning may shed light upon the intricate issue of polysemy.

Part 4 is entitled "Image schemas and beyond: Expanded and alternative notions" and contains three chapters. While Michael Kimmel argues for situated and compound image schemas, Jordan Zlatev seeks to link bodily mimesis to the grounding of language to see what a schema really contains, and more importantly, to provide evidence for the assumption that linguistic meaning is grounded not in image schemas but in mimetic schemas. Margarita Correa-Beningfield, Gitte Kristiansen, Ignasi Navarro-Ferrando and Claude Vandeloise compare and contrast image schemas with complex primitives within the framework of cross-cultural spatial cognition, arguing that the latter notion viewed as family resemblances expressed in propositional form can do a better job in providing a more adequate account of linguistic polysemy.

Part 5 comprises four chapters devoted to new case studies on the image-schematic structure of cognition. In "Dynamic patterns of CONTAINMENT", Robert Dewell illustrates the dynamic construal processes of CONTAINMENT, which is claimed to be a basic image-schematic pattern linked to more general transformational patterns deeply grounded in human experience. The author is right in placing special emphasis upon the crucial role of language in the development of image schemas before concluding that we should return to Johnson's (1987) view that image schemas are intrinsically dynamic patterns. In "Image schemas and verbal synaesthesia", Yanna Popova associates the linguistic analysis of synaesthetic adjective-noun pairs to perceptual synaesthesia and tactile perception, highlighting the cross-modal nature of image schemas, and in particular, the ubiquity of the SCALE schema in conceptualizing properties. In "Image schemas and gesture", Alan Cienki presents an experiment to see the relationship between gesture and image schemas with the finding that, among other things, gestures can "provide easily accessible manifestations of image schemas" (p. 435) and that "gestures can depict, or invoke, different schemas than speech alone can" (p. 436). The last chapter of this book is Todd Oakley's "Force-dynamic dimensions of rhetorical effect", which applies Talmy's notions of force dynamics and event frames to the analysis of two rhetorical texts, confirming the view that image-schematic patterns are crucial to human reasoning and imagination. This book ends with author and subject indices.

To sum up, From Perception to Meaning is an important collection of articles on image schema theory. Rather than presenting a unified account of image schemas, it explores various possible ways in which image schemas can be approached and, more importantly, how the very notion of image schemas may open up new avenues for exploring a variety of hidden complexities of human thought, language, brain, mind and cognition. Contributed by many leading scholars of image schema theory, including George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Raymond W. Gibbs and Leonard Talmy, From Perception to Meaning is an authoritative, well written and thought-provoking volume. It presents the current state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical issues related to image schemas and also points to possible directions in which further endeavors might be made for a better and deeper understanding of the fundamental role of image schemas in human understanding and explanation of language, reality, brain and mind. Given its interdisciplinary perspectives, this book promises to be of great value to various areas of inquiry, such as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, cognitive pragmatics, cultural studies and cognitive linguistics in particular.

It goes without saying that any notion or concept alone cannot explain certain phenomena adequately; rather, it only presents a certain perspective upon things we observe. Image schemas are no exception: image schemas are not everything. In addition, one may, for example, wonder about the "family resemblances" between image schemas and other similar notions like frames or scripts.

References

Johnson, M. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Our Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Talmy, L. 1983. How language structures space. In Pick, H. L. and L P. Acredolo (eds.), Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research, and Application. New York: Plenum Press, 225-282.

Links

© 2002-present ICLA; all rights reserved.
Site admin information and contact