Conceptual Blending and Metaphorical Extension in the Child's Mind: “Watering” and “Drinking” as Examples. A Cognitive – Linguistic Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22046/LA.2023.19Keywords:
Conceptual Metaphor, Cognitive Linguistic, Conceptual Blending, Metaphorical AcquisitionAbstract
This study examines the relationship between conceptual blending and metaphorical extension in the child’s mind. This is based on a field study that tracked the metaphorical behaviour of a random sample of children consisting of (64) participants (male and female equally), ranging in age from (4) to (7) years. The participants are divided into four categories: preschoolers and First-year elementary school learners in the private and public sectors of the Moroccan educational context. For the purpose above, we have built a perceptual–linguistic test that measures the relationship between conceptual blending and metaphorical extension of the child in general: taking both watering and drinking as examples. at the same time, reveals which paths this metaphorical blending may take more specifically. All this with the objective to approach the processes of the production of metaphors and their representation in the mind of this group of participants, and to describe the cognitive mechanisms behind these mental operations that show the way the metaphor is treated in various dimensions: psychological, conceptual, and perceptual. The study concluded that conceptual blending was the basis of metaphorical extension for the child, with relative differences between the participants because of the variable of age: the lower the age of the participant is the wider the integration. In association with the path of linking the two experiences, the results showed that the metaphorical linking emanates from the most embodied experience as reflected in literature on embodied cognitive paradigm and is consistent with the hypothesis of the Embodied Mind.
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