Metaphoric extension, relational categories, and abstraction

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet: A study via metaphoric perceptions on how online feedback benefited Chinese learners

“…The metaphor, likes analogies, is often used to refer to nonliteral similarity comparisons (Gentner and Asmuth 2017;Gentner et al 1988). Comparisons are important in the matching process of the topic (or tenor) and the vehicle as it 'looks for features and relations common to the topic and vehicle' (Gernsbacher et al 2001, p. 434).…”

Abstraction and concepts: when, how, where, what and why?

“…Pexman (2017) also makes the intriguing claim that examining development may shed light on how, in a sensorimotor-based framework, abstract concepts such as truth can be represented. She points out that if, as other authors have suggested, abstract concepts are grounded through language, emotion, and/or metaphor (see also Gentner & Asmuth, 2017) then children's abstract concepts (and their reliance on these systems) will necessarily change as their systems for language, emotion, and metaphor understanding develop. In other words, abstract concepts may rely on different systems depending in part on the developmental phase of the child.…”

“…Most abstract relational concepts arise, Gentner and Asmuth (2017) propose, via analogy to more concrete concepts, a process they refer to as the Career of Metaphor. For example, the abstract, relational meaning of anchor (anything that prevents something else from moving in an undesirable direction) may have come about through processing figurative language like "their religion is like an anchor".…”

“…Connell (2018) also suggests, however, that rather than being simply a cheaper, imperfect proxy for sensorimotor information, linguistic information can also carry unique information (see also Davis & Yee, 2018;Gentner & Asmuth, 2017;Lupyan & Lewis, 2017;Pexman, 2017;Sloutsky & Deng, 2017). For example, Connell points out that because we use language not only to describe the world, but also to "question, analyze, interpret, abstract, and predict it … linguistic information may capture qualitatively different aspects of conceptual information" than simulated informationaspects which may be particularly important for abstract concepts.…”

“…3 They suggest that words do more than activate embodied (or, in Connell's [2018] terms, situated) mental states, but they also help construct those mental states. For example, they point out that distributional models of semantics, which derive all of their knowledge from the distributional statistics of words in large corpora of language, can not only extract word pair similarity, but also, "by calculating a direction vector between one word … and another and then translating it onto another word, the network's learned representations are able to form a kind of analogical reasoning" (see also Gentner & Asmuth, 2017). Importantly, however, this feat should not be taken as evidence that experience of the world is unnecessary for conceptual knowledgefor the language that goes into these models, of course, comes from humans whose language includes information about their sensory experiences in the world (see also Connell, 2018).…”