The Neural Embodiment Of Metaphorical Language: An FMRI Study And Beyond

This thesis first examines George Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory and embodiment hypothesis and points to the empirical nature of his theory. It is claimed that the theory should jump out of the linguistic camp and avoid circularity of reasoning by incorporating other research in neighboring disciplines. From a neuro-scientific perspective, Lakoff's theory can be conceived as such: since abstract concepts are based on physical concrete ones, bodily experience in particular, the neural circuitry for physical domain should be recruited in abstract domain. Take grasp for example. In 'I grasp an apple', grasp refers to a particular type of bodily action. Grasp can also be used in sentences like 'I grasp your point', which means 'understand' in a seemingly arbitrary way unrelated to the first meaning. Since metaphorical language is embodied in bodily experience as stressed by Lakoff over and again, it should be expected that the neural circuitry for hand movement is recruited by the abstract concept 'understand' even though the speaker is not actually doing any "grasping" or hand movement for that matter.In order to prove this hypothesis, an fMRI experiment was conducted on two Chinese-speaking subjects by having them passively listen to sentences describing actions performed with the hand and in another task, hand-related metaphorical sentences. As a control condition, the participants listened to sentences with an abstract content with irrelevant subject matter. The resultant images of areas of activations from hand literal sentence and metaphorical sentence reveal overlapping areas in hand regions. Therefore, this experiment provides strong evidence in favor of Lakoff's theory and what is more, puts language understanding in new perspective by taking a simulation-based view of language understanding.