A Cognitive Study on Linguistic Expressions of Spatial Metaphors

DOI

10.2991/cesses-18.2018.118How to use a DOI?

Keywords

spatial metaphor; cognitive linguistics; conceptual structure

Abstract

Metaphor has long been studied both in the western world and in China. From the viewpoint of the contemporary metaphorical theory, many of our fundamental concepts are structured through spatial metaphors rooted in our physical, social and cultural experiences. Cognitive linguists view knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, as arising out of people’s interaction with the world, and among this knowledge, the primacy is given to space. The reason is that spatial relations are relatively concrete as they are the relationships that are most direct to us human beings and thus most easily accessible. Space serves as a fundamental conceptual structuring device in language. It is served as a category with which human beings interact with their environment. Meanwhile, spatial terms are often used in fundamentally non-spatial domains, through metaphorical mapping, lending a spatial structure to the non-spatial domains. This paper focuses on the linguistic expressions of spatial metaphors from a cognitive approach.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - He Pan
PY  - 2018/11
DA  - 2018/11
TI  - A Cognitive Study on Linguistic Expressions of Spatial Metaphors
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Ecological Studies (CESSES 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 525
EP  - 531
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/cesses-18.2018.118
DO  - 10.2991/cesses-18.2018.118
ID  - Pan2018/11
ER  -