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

本研究对(1)空间、(2)时间、(3)情感、(4)声音象征现象等概念域的隐喻结构的认知和体现特性进行了研究。我们的研究发现：(1)空间自我的正面运动促进了空间参照系从反射到平移。(2)在日语中，存在着一种被称为图形对齐的投影现象，即图形对象的轴线被投射到参照对象上。(3)日语空间词“mae”、“Ushio”、“temae”、“saki”和“muou”都包含空间参照系的规范作为其语义属性。在时空隐喻中，前后词语的空间用法与时间用法是相互关联的。英语和日语从消化系统到情感的隐喻映射不同。(5)源于空间词的时间连接词保留了其空间结构的图式结构。日语对愤怒、焦虑和惊讶等各种情绪有更详细的扩展。在英语中，消化系统似乎没有延伸到愤怒的领域。因此，声音象征法超越了拟声词。一些语音特征(元音高度、发音)与某些意义相关，如大/小、硬/软等，这些构成了自然语言具体化属性的实例化。

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.