The image‐schematic basis of causation and concession in English and Spanish

Abstract

AbstractCognitive linguistics holds that meaning in language is the mapping between linguistic expressions and cognitive structures that arise from our direct sensory experience and interactions with the world. Taking as a starting point the notions of image schema (Lakoff & Johnson ) and force dynamics (Talmy ), in two experiments, we tested naïve subjects’ intuitions about the image‐schematic basis of causal and concessive discourse markers. In the first experiment, conducted in English and Spanish, subjects were confronted with a series of animation that depicted forceful interactions between two entities and were asked to make a force‐choice response indicating the sentences that best described the animations that they had watched. English and Spanish participants showed a general preference for descriptions with causal connectives when one of the entities involved in the interaction was overcome by the other. On the contrary, sentences with concessive connectors were favored when the attempts of one of the entities to control the other were unsuccessful. Similar results were obtained in a second experiment where subjects’ judgments were explicitly guided by the sentence connectors given that the linguistic descriptions that accompanied the animations included a nonce verb in their coda such that literal references to the notion of force were avoided. Altogether, these results support the hypothesis that there is consistency across‐ subjects in the imagistic basis of causal and concessive connectives, which seem to recruit our experiential knowledge about forces as part of their meaning.