Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
17 Space for thinking
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Daniel Casasanto
MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Description
This chapter explores a potential solution: perhaps the mind recruits old structures for new uses. Perhaps sensory and motor representations that result from physical interactions with the world (e.g., representations of physical space) are recycled to support abstract thought. This hypothesis is motivated, in part, by patterns observed in language: in order to talk about abstract things, speakers oft en recruit metaphors from more concrete or perceptually rich domains.