Looking at Image Schemas

The goal of this study was to revisit the nature and role of image schemata in language use. Image schemas have often been thought to be low-level quasi-primitives that structure much of language and thought (Johnson, 1987; Oakley 2010). Over the years, they have been studied by cognitive scientists who are interested in the semantics of language, both literal and non-literal. In this study, we queried naive participants’ intuitions about various verbs in everyday English sentences. The events they denoted have various visuospatial orientations: horizontal, vertical, or some combination or modification of those orientations. The results of our survey, which follow on earlier work (Richardson, Spivey, Edelman & Naples, 2001), show robust consistency among people’s intuitions and provide further insights into how image schemas work, in particular, how they are dynamic, flexible, and combine to create meaning.