Mental Models across Languages: The visual representation of baldness terms in German, English, and Japanese

This book presents a study that triangulates the meanings of expressions across English, German and Japanese via their perception-based conceptual representations. In an online experiment, native speakers of the three languages were asked to design visual representations of expressions referring to baldness phenomena. These sets of visualizations are used to determine conceptual overlap or distance between expressions in the three languages, resulting in lexical-conceptual 'maps' for MALE BALDNESS. The study is discussed against the background of an embodied, perceptual symbol-based understanding of linguistic meaning. A section of the book further applies this perspective to the issue of translation, developing a process model of translation based on the concept of cognitive equivalence.
The book presents a novel approach to lexical semantics from a cognitive linguistic perspective, tested through a methodologically innovative experiment. It is a compelling read to scholars in cognitive semantics, contrastive semantics, embodied cognition and cognitive translation studies.
See more