A study on cognitive and physiological grounding for metaphoric structures in natural language

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In this project, research has been carried out on the cognitive and embodied properties of metaphoric structures of the conceptual domains of (1) space, (2) time, (3) emotion, and the phenomenon of (4) sound symbolism. Our studies have revealed the following points.SPACE(1) Ego's frontal motion facilitates the shift of spatial reference frame from Reflection to Translation.(2) In Japanese there exists a phenomenon we call "figure-aligned projection", where the axes of the Figure Object is projected onto the Reference Object.(3) Japanese spatial terms "mae," "ushiro," "temae," "saki," and "mukou" include specifications of spatial reference frames as their semantic property. They also have semantic features that cannot be reduced to reference frames.TIME(4) In the space-to-time metaphors, the spatial uses of FRONT/BACK terms correlates with their temporal uses. Implication of Ego's frontal motion plays a role in this extension.(5) Temporal conjunctions that are derived from spatial terms preserve the image-schematic structures of their spatial construals.EMOTION(6) English and Japanese have different metaphorical mappings from digestive systems to emotion. Japanese has more elaborated extensions to various emotions such as anger, anxiety, and surprise. In English, digestive system does not seem to extend to the domain of anger.SOUND SYMBOLISM(7) Sound symbolism is seen beyond onomatopoeia. Some phonological features (height of vowels, sonorancy) are related to certain meanings like LARGE/SMALL, HARD/SOFT, etc. These constitute an instantiation of embodied properties of natural language.