Image schema

The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady.

In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings.

Similarly, Johnson argues that transitivity and the law of the excluded middle in logic are underlaid by preconceptual embodied experiences of the Containment schema.

In case study two of his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff re-presented the analysis of the English word over done by Claudia Brugman in her (1981) master's thesis.

Furthermore, Lakoff identified a group of "transformational" image schemata such as rotational schemas and path to object mass, as in Spider-Man climbed all over the wall.

Johnson indicates that his analysis of out drew upon a 1981 doctoral dissertation by Susan Lindner in linguistics at UCSD under Ronald Langacker, and more generally by the theory of cognitive grammar put forth by him.

Other influences include Max Wertheimer's gestalt structure theory and Kant's account of schemas in categorization, as well as studies in experimental psychology on the mental rotation of images.

The research on formal accounts (e.g.[13][14]) of these abstract patterns date back several decades and has been proposed as a way to deal with geographical information science ,[15] natural language comprehension, automatic ontology generation[16] and computational conceptual blending.