Читать книгу Task-based grammar teaching of English - Susanne Niemeier - Страница 22

Language is not only a reflection of human cognition but at the same time reflects the fact that humans are embodied beings. The bodies people have influence their experience of the world, which is then reflected in the language they use and the ways how they use it. Many basic experiences have to do with the human body, which is therefore a crucial element in many areas of conceptualization. Cognitive linguists call this phenomenon ‘embodiment’ and speak of ‘embodied meaning’, which is seen as deriving from people’s general cognition, world view and experiences1. To give an example: an embrace offers human warmth, which is seen as positive2, and therefore the expression “a warm welcome”, even if it refers to an encounter where nobody touches another person and therefore no body warmth can actually be experienced, metonymically relates to a positive experience as well.

Another example, this time from the area of grammar, relates to the fact that humans experience their bodies as containers (containing, for example, their organs, their blood, other body fluids etc.) and therefore the preposition in always refers to containment, either in a concrete sense (“wine in the bottle”) or in a temporal sense (“I have to be back in an hour” – the hour contains the time that the person was allotted) or in a metaphorical sense (“I was caught in a traffic jam” – the traffic jam is seen as a container which contains lots of cars and persons, amongst them the speaker). All these situations share the idea of containment (be this concrete, temporal or abstract) due to the use of the preposition in3. As can be seen from these examples, humans conceptualise their surroundings according to their embodied knowledge and it is only a small step to assume that they do not only do this when speaking but also when thinking.