NEW APPROACH TO METAPHOR INTERPRETATION, EMBODIED SIMULATION NEW APPROACH TO METAPHOR INTERPRETATION, EMBODIED SIMULATION

Abstract

Understanding metaphorical expressions is one of the most critical parts of linguistic interpretation. This paper first gives a brief review of traditional metaphor interpretation according to which metaphor understanding depends on a person’s mental lexicon. Cohering the meanings of abstract ideas together, a reader creates a well-formed mental model of the whole narrative. My claim in this paper is that people comprehend metaphors through embodied simulation where they imaginatively recreate the action they read or hear about. Imaginative simulation processes, which are fundamentally part of the embodied mind, guide many aspects of metaphor understanding. This process of building a simulation is constrained by the past and present bodily experience. In the paper I employ the term “image schema, ”that has been enjoying popularity among cognitive scholars, to decode the metaphor and create concrete understanding of abstract concepts. This paper demonstrates the examples of metaphors based on the metaphor vehicle “journey,” we discuss “grief as a journey” claiming that people conceive of grief in terms of bodily actions. From the analysis of the different examples in the paper, it is concluded that simulation may come into play at different levels, depending on the metaphor and the context in which it is employed.

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