Semantics

COGNITIVE STRUCTURES 215
6. PLACE for INSTITUTION
a) The White House denies allegations.
b) The Palace defends the sackings.
10.3. IMAGE SCHEMAS
Lakoff and Johnson explain that because of our physical experience
of being and acting in the world, that is, perceiving the environment,
moving our bodies, exerting and experiencing force, we form the basic
conceptual structures that we later use to organize thought across a range
of more abstract domains. We will be studying a few schemas following
Johnson (1987). These are the containment, path and force schemas.
Containment schema
According to Johnson the schema of containment derives from our
experience of the human body itself as a container. It also derives from
our own experience of being physically located within bounded locations
like rooms, beds, etc. And, finally it also derives from the fact that we put
objects into containers. The result is an abstract schema, of physical
containment of an entity within a bounded location.
This idea leads to a number of conclusions that take on the form of
“rules” of the kind:
1. elements are either in or out of the container
2. containment is typically transitive: “if I am in bed and my bed is in
my room, then I am in my room”
Johnson calls implications a number of inferences, such as that the
experience of containment typically involves protection from outside forces
or that it limits forces, such as movement, within the container. He defines
schemas as gestalt structures that connect aspects of our experience and
lead to inferences in our conceptual structure.
Because this schema of containment can be extended by a process of
metaphorical extension into abstract domains, Lakoff and Johnson have
defined CONTAINER as one of a group of ontological metaphors in which
our experience of non-physical phenomena is described in terms of simple
physical objects like substances and containers. For example, the visual
field is often conceived of as a container:
This ship is coming into view
There is nothing in sight