An image schematic account of the polysemy of the verb 'see': A Pilot Study

This paper is a report of an examination on the role that recurring bodily experience, or image schemas, play in understanding various meanings of the polysemous word see , taken from the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. According to cognitive semantics, various patterns of recurring bodily experience, called image schemas, emerge in our perceptual understanding of actions and events in the real world. Therefore, the central assumption of the study is that each meaning of see is motivated by a complex pattern of different image schemas. Two experiments have been designed to study whether the different meanings of see can be motivated by image schemas. Experiment 1 applied a similarity test to look at people’s judgments of similarity for different meanings of see to reveal the tendencies by running an inter-rater agreement test and reporting the related observations. Experiment 2 first examined people’s intuitions about the relative importance of five image schemas for different meanings of see ; I then tried to predict the pattern of data from Experiment 1 by using the image schema profiles obtained for the different meanings of see in Experiment 2. I expected meaningful connections between image schemas and the various meanings of the polysemous word see . The data from the two experiments generally suggest significant connections between the introduced image schemas and the various meanings of the polysemous word see . Based on the findings, it can be argued that besides some conceptual operations such as metaphorization, metonymization, generalization, specification, image schematic motivation is another crucial factor of meaning extension (and hence the emergence of polysemy) deserving more scholarly attention.