Embodied Semantics and the Mirror Neurons: Past Research and Some Proposals for the Future

Putta, Paolo Della

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91277-6_2

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis (e.g. Gallese & Lakoff 2005;Hampe & Grady 2005;Aziz-Zadeh et al 2006;Barsalou 2008;Della Putta 2018). Researchers suggest that the neural constraints of our "wiring" dictate the directionality of and the non-arbitrariness of synaesthesia and metaphor.…”

Section: The Results Of the Second Specific Corpus Analysis [Adjectivmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste and sight

Sandford

2019

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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Embodiment is central to the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis. We receive the information of the world around us through the bodily sensations; i.e. we perceive, then process and conceptualize it. Research into the sensory domains has continued to elicit further examination of how we use metaphoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Investigation has been carried out both on the single sense domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. Linguistic transfer between various senses seems to respect a hierarchy from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hearing and sight), even though some variation of this hierarchy has been noted. The present study is the first part of a two-fold analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of taste and sight. The objective is to verify what collocations occur between the two domains: do they respect the hierarchy, and how frequent, or how strong are they? Corpus analysis of the construction of the adjective + noun type are in keeping with existing literature: the sensory domain that functions as source is understood as an adjective modifying another sensory domain, which is found  This research was made possible through research funds from the University of Perugia and an "Erasmus+" Teaching Mobility grant. I would like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek, especially Mario Brdar, Marinja Omazić, and Tanja Gradečak, with the many other people involved, for ther kind and thoughtful support. Furthermore, I would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments, any outstanding errors remain my own. Jodi L. Sandford: Taste and sight: A corpus analysis of English adjective-noun constructionsin the form of a noun. This research concentrates on cross-modal pairs found through a corpus-based analysis of taste adjectives in the description of vision nouns, e.g. delicious colors. Linguistic data were retrieved from corpora that allow for comparison of the actual usage and definition of these constructions. These include the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of English. The experimental methodology is in keeping with the usage-based approach of Cognitive Linguistics, considering frequency and relevance.

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Section: The Results Of the Second Specific Corpus Analysis [Adjectivmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste and sight

Sandford

2019

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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“…Findings in the current study contribute to our knowledge concerning sensorimotor representations in language processing. According to the mirror neuron hypothesis (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2016) and the embodied semantics (Bechtold et al, 2023; Della Putta, 2018), the mirror property of the motor system supports understanding action semantics by activating neural representations of relevant motor action (Hauk et al, 2004). The present results extend the embodied semantics to a more general sense by demonstrating that the frontocentral beta activity responds to the context-dependent social information beyond the semantic meaning of the speaker’s words.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causal role of frontocentral beta oscillation in comprehending linguistic communicative functions

Chang,

Zhao,

Wang

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Linguistic communication is often considered as an action serving the function of conveying the speaker’s goal to the addressee. Although neuroimaging studies have suggested a role of the motor system in comprehending communicative functions, the underlying mechanism is yet to be specified. Here, by 2 EEG experiments and a tACS experiment, we demonstrate that the frontocentral beta oscillation, which represents action states, plays a crucial part in linguistic communication understanding. Participants read scripts involving 2 interlocutors and rated the interlocutors’ attitudes. Each script included a critical sentence uttered by the speaker expressing a context-dependent function of either promise, request, or reply to the addressee’s query. These functions were behaviorally discriminated, with higher addressee’s will rating for the promise than for the reply and higher speaker’s will rating for the request than for the reply. EEG multivariate analyses showed that different communicative functions were represented by different patterns of frontocentral beta activity but not by patterns of alpha activity. Further tACS results showed that, relative to alpha tACS and sham stimulation, beta tACS improved the predictability of communicative functions of request or reply, as measured by the speaker’s will rating. These results convergently suggest a causal role of the frontocentral beta activities in comprehending linguistic communications.

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Embodied Cognition, affects and language comprehension

Odendahl

2020

Phenom Cogn Sci

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Our main considerations take as a starting point the educational policy demand for a model of competence of text comprehension, which should make it possible to measure and systematically increase comprehension accomplishments and competences. The approach of classical cognitive psychology appears particularly suitable for this purpose, which determines comprehension as a rule-guided transfer of a sign complex into a mental representation. However, such representationalism tends to be aporetic in character. A way out of this problem is offered by recent concepts of understanding from the area of Embodied Cognition, according to which all mental operations are embedded in physical interaction processes. Comprehension means, in this sense, letting physical primary experiences be reproduced in a trial-action fashion. This approach is, in this paper, reconsidered in relation to the role of subjectivity and affect: Physical experiences are meaning-generating because they exhibit a subjectively perceived affective valence between pleasure and suffering. The beginning of all understanding therefore is to be located within the emotional sphere. Such a conception of understanding is supposed to have a considerable impact upon language-and literature teaching in schools. For example, training of reading skills should always be embedded in body-bound experiences. Moreover, learning and understanding both mean cultivating an alert ear for affective undertones, needs and irritations, which might even lead to drawing the curricular benchmarks and competency targets into question. Finally, as art and literature establish areas of freedom and play, literature teaching, especially, needs to be founded on affective awareness, discursive openness and proceeding voluntariness.

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Embodied Semantics and the Mirror Neurons: Past Research and Some Proposals for the Future

Cited by 6 publications

References 76 publications

Taste and sight

Taste and sight

Causal role of frontocentral beta oscillation in comprehending linguistic communicative functions

Embodied Cognition, affects and language comprehension

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