Embodied experience and linguistic meaning

What role does people's embodied experiences have in their use and understanding of meaning? Most theories in cognitive science view meaning in terms of propositional structures that may be combined to form higher-order complexes in representing the meanings of conversations and texts. A newer approach seeks to capture meaning in terms of high-dimensional semantic space. Both views reflect the idea that meaning is best understood as abstract and disembodied symbols. My aim in this article is to make the case for an embodied view of linguistic meaning. This view provides a challenge to traditional approaches to linguistic meaning (although may not necessarily be entirely incompatible with them). I discuss several new lines of research from both linguistics and psychology that explore the importance of embodied perception and action in people's understanding of words, phrases, and texts. These data provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that significant aspects of thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment.