Embodied Life and Death in English: A Prototypical Approach to Study Embodied Language
摘要
This chapter presents the qualitative and quantitative findings of the experiments investigating how English speakers embody and conceptualize the abstract domains of LIFE and DEATH. Drawing on perceptual and conceptual prototypes, the results reveal systematic mappings across sensory, spatial, and emotional dimensions. Moreover, our findings demonstrate that participants consistently grounded these concepts in sensorimotor and affective experience, through color, form, material, place, body, action, and sensory imagery. The results provide strong empirical support for the framework of embodied cognition (Barsalou, Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645, 2008) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, & Johnson, Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, 1980), confirming that even the most abstract ideas are structured through bodily and perceptual schemas. Together, these findings illustrate how English conceptualizations reflect both universal embodied patterns and culture-specific metaphorical elaborations compared to German and Persian (methodological details are provided in Chap. 5 ).