The Embodied Hypothesis:A Cognitive Approach to Plant Metaphors

This study is concerned with the Embodiment hypothesis,a central issue in cognitive linguistics. It claims that "human physical,cognitive and social embodiment ground our conceptual and linguistic systems"(Rohrer 2003). It reports an empirical research from a perspective of plant terminology,which intends to test the embodiment hypothesis by exploring what lies behind those metaphorical extensions of plant terms from the cognitive perspective. In the study,the author devotes to an exhaustive collection of metaphorical extensions of plant names by looking up some books and dictionaries. Then the author makes an analysis of the people's subjective evaluations of the plants thus to find out the metaphorical schemas of plants in people's mind and the cognitive motivation lying behind these schemas by doing some questionnaire. The results show that people's attitudes towards plants are partially based on bodily experiences and it supports the Embodiment Hypothesis to some extent.