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date: 15 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

The basic problem of language is childlike in its simplicity: How can we understand one another? How is it that I can make some noises, you can hear them, and we can arrive at some shared meaning? How can we ever be sure we are really thinking the same thought as a result of our communication? Two broad approaches to answering this question divide those who study language and semantics. This article explores the many ways in which the term “embodiment” has been cashed out by various researchers in cognitive linguistics. It then retraces some of the history of the embodiment hypothesis and show how its scope expanded to encompass topics as diverse as the grounding of meaning, the motivating factors of semantic change, experientialism, experimental cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Finally, the article offers a theoretical framework inspired by related work in the philosophy of cognitive science and intended to serve as a useful organizational tool for situating and making connections between these varying research projects.

Keywords: embodiment, experientialism, cognitive linguistics, semantics, cognitive neuroscience, language, semantic change, experimental cognitive psychology, meaning

Tim Rohrer

Tim Rohrer (PhD 1998) took his PhD in the philosophy of Cognitive Science at the University of Oregon under the guidance of Mark Johnson. Since 1987, when he first saw the potential of using cognitive semantics as a tool to analyze the political rhetoric of international peacemaking negotiations, he has been an active researcher and frequent contributor to the field. In 1994, he founded the online Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor at the University of Oregon to disseminate cognitive semantics research on the World Wide Web. He has recently held a Fulbright Fellowship at the Center for Semiotic Research in Aarhus, Denmark (where he collaborated with Per Aage Brandt and Chris Sinha on Embodiment Theory), and a NIH Fellowship to the Institute for Neural Computation and the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, where he conducted ERP and fMRI studies on conceptual metaphor. Currently, he is at work on a book tentatively titled Sensual Language: Embodiment, Cognition and the Brain and directs the Colorado Advanced Research Institute. Tim Rohrer can be reached at rohrer@cogsci.ucsd.edu.

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