This 2006 book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied.

Results are reported of six experiments in which comprehension and memory for sarcastic statements in conversation are examined. Data from three reading-time studies indicate that people do not need to first process the literal meanings of sarcastic expressions, such as "You're a fine friend" (meaning "You're a bad friend"), before deriving their nonliteral, sarcastic interpretations. Subjects also comprehended instances of sarcasm based on an explicit echoic mention of some belief, societal norm, or previously stated opinion faster than they did instances in which the echo was only implicit. Three additional experiments examining memory for sarcasm showed that sarcasm was remembered much better than literal uses of the same expressions of nonsarcastic equivalents. Moreover, subjects recalled sarcasm that explicitly echoed a previously mentioned belief or societal norm more often that they remembered sarcasm that did not involve some explicit echo. Together, these experiments demonstrated that ease of processing and memory for sarcastic utterances depends crucially on how explicitly a speaker's statement echoes either the addressee or some other source's putative beliefs, opinions, or previous statement.

Three experiments examine people's understanding and memory for idioms. Experiment 1 indicates that in a conversational context, subjects take less time to comprehend conventional uses of idiomatic expression than unconventional, literal uses. Paraphrase judgment errors show that there is a strong bias to interpret idiomatic expressions conventionally when there is no preceding context; however, subjects interpret literal uses of these expressions correctly when there is appropriate context. Experiment 2 showed that in a free recall task, literal uses of idioms are remembered better than conventional uses of these utterances. Experiment 3 indicated that in conversation, literal and idiomatic recall prompts facilitate memory for literal uses of idioms equally well. The results from these experiments suggest that memory for conventional utterances is not as good as for unconventional uses of the same utterances and that subjects understanding unconventional uses of idioms tend to analyze the idiomatic meaning of these expressions before deriving the literal, unconventional interpretation. It is argued that the traditional distinction between literal and metaphoric language is better characterized as a continuum between conventional and unconventional utterances.

No abstract

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ' grasp a concept ' or ' get over ' an emotion involve simulating what it must be like to engage in these specifi c activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specifi c consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. surely in the dark, but more like a dark tunnel. If we begin to move forward, we will work our way through the tunnel to the other side -to where we can begin to learn to live again.None of the metaphorical phrases employed in these excerpts are especially novel or poetic. Yet the various conventional expressions (e.g. ' getting over ' something in reference to an abstract entity) and elaborations of the basic grief as a journey theme (e.g. needing ' directions, supplies, plans ' etc.) nicely combine to form a coherent scenario of the grief experience, one which most readers can readily understand and, perhaps, appreciate. Given the conventional forms of metaphor used here, one might assume, as do many metaphor scholars, that interpreting the discourse is primarily a matter of looking up the encoded meanings of these different phrases, maybe from a mental, phrasal lexicon, and then tying these meanings together to create a well-formed mental model (e.g. a structured propositional network) of the whole narrative.However, my claim is that part of our ability to make sense of this narrative, and its various conventional metaphors, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in these excerpts. Thus, metaphorical references to getting over and through grief, needing directions, supplies, plans and support from others in dealing with grief, being lost in the dark tunnel of grief and moving forward to the other side, are all understood by simulating what it must be like to perform these specifi c activities, even though it is, strictly speaking, impossible to physically act on abstract entities like the emotion of grief. We experience grief, in this case, as a process of moving through ' affective space ' in which we imaginatively encounter different physical obstacles and learn to overcome these in our ongoing emotional journey ( Gibbs, 2006a ). This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and prese...