What is an image schema?
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C6-P178
2025-12-17
31
What is an image schema?
In his (1987) book The Body in the Mind, Mark Johnson proposed that embodied experience gives rise to image schemas within the conceptual system. Image schemas derive from sensory and perceptual experience as we interact with and move about in the world. For example, given that humans walk upright, and because we have a head at the top of our bodies and feet at the bottom, and given the presence of gravity which attracts unsupported objects, the vertical axis of the human body is functionally asymmetrical. This means that the vertical axis is characterised by an up-down or top-bottom asymmetry: the top and bottom parts of our bodies are different.
Cognitive semanticists argue that the asymmetry of the body’s vertical axis is meaningful for us because of the way we interact with our environment. For example, gravity ensures that unsupported objects fall to the ground; given the asymmetry of the human vertical axis, we have to stoop to pick up fallen objects and look in one direction (downwards) for fallen objects and in another (upwards) for rising objects. In other words, our physiology ensures that our vertical axis, which interacts with gravity, gives rise to meaning as a result of how we interact with our environment.
According to Johnson, this aspect of our experience gives rise to an image schema: the UP-DOWN schema. Moreover, as shown by the developmental psychologist Jean Mandler, image schemas are emergent. This means that because this experience is a function of our bodies and of our interaction in the world, this type of experience arises in conjunction with our physical and psychological development during early childhood. In other words, image schemas are not claimed to be innate knowledge structures. For example, we know from work in developmental psychology that in the early stages of development infants learn to orient themselves in the physical world: they follow the motion of moving objects with their eyes, and later reach out their hands intentionally to grasp those moving objects and so on (Mandler 2004).
The term ‘image’ in ‘image schema’ is equivalent to the use of this term in psychology, where imagistic experience relates to and derives from our experience of the external world. Another term for this type of experience is sensory experience, because it comes from sensory-perceptual mechanisms that include, but are not restricted to, the visual system. Some of these sensory perceptual mechanisms are summarised in Table 6.1. It is therefore important to emphasise that although the term ‘image’ is restricted to visual perception in everyday language, it has a broader application in psychology and in cognitive linguistics, where it encompasses all types of sensory-perceptual experience.
Imagistic experience is contrasted with what psychologists call introspective experience: internal subjective experience such as feelings or emotions. The term ‘schema’ in ‘image schema’ is also very important: it means that image schemas are not rich or detailed concepts, but rather abstract concepts consisting of patterns emerging from repeated instances of embodied experience. If we take a parallel example from language, words like thing or container have rather more schematic meanings than words like pencil or teacup. This use of the term ‘schema’ is therefore consistent with the range of ways in which the term is used elsewhere in cognitive linguistics.
By way of illustration, the image schema CONTAINER results from our recur rent and ubiquitous experiences with containers as revealed by this extract from Johnson’s (1987) book, which describes the start of an ordinary day:
You wake out of a deep sleep and peer out from beneath the covers into your room. You gradually emerge out of your stupor, pull yourself out from under the covers, climb into your robe, stretch out your limbs, and walk in a daze out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and see your face staring out at you. You reach into the medicine cabinet, take out the toothpaste, squeeze out some toothpaste, put the toothbrush into your mouth, brush your teeth in a hurry, and rinse out your mouth. (Johnson 1987: 331; our italics differ from the original)
As this example reveals by the recurrent use of the expressions in and out, a great number of everyday objects and experiences are categorised as specific instances of the schematic concept CONTAINER: not only obvious containers like bathroom cabinets and toothpaste tubes or less obvious ‘containers’ like bed-covers, clothing and rooms, but also states like sleep, stupor and daze.
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