Taking a Stand on the Meanings of Stand: Bodily Experience as Motivation for Polysemy

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Abstract
This paper reports four experiments designed to examine the role that recurring bodily experiences have in motivating people's understandings of different senses of the polysemous word stand. Different patterns of recurring bodily experiences, called image schemas, emerge throughout sensorimotor activity and from our perceptual understanding of actions and events in the real world. The present claim is that each use of stand is motivated by a complex pattern of different image schemas. Experiment 1 revealed five major image schemas that are primarily to people's bodily experiences of standing. Experiment 2 looked at people's judgements of similarity for different uses of stand. Experiment 3 first examined people's intuitions about the relative importance of five image schemas for different senses of stand. We then attempted to predict the pattern of data from Experiment 2 using the image schema profiles obtained for the different senses of stand in Experiment 3. Finally,-Experiment 4 considered an alternative hypothesis for people's judgements of similarity for different uses of stand. The data from these studies generally suggest that people tacitly believe there are significant connections between their recurring bodily experiences and the various meanings of the polysemous word stand. We argue that theories of psychological semantics should account not only for the organization of polysemous words in the mental lexicon, but must also be capable of explaining why different senses of a word make sense to people in the way they do.

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