Image Schema - Lakoff: Image Schemas in Brugman's The Story of Over

Lakoff: Image Schemas in Brugman's The Story of Over

In case study two of his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff re-presented the analysis done of the English word over done by Claudia Brugman in her doctoral dissertation. Similar to the analysis of out given by Johnson, Lakoff argued that there were six basic spatial schemas for the English word over. Moreover, Lakoff gave a detailed accounting of how these schemas were interrelated in terms of what he called a radial category structure. For example, these six schemas could be both further specified by other spatial schemas such as whether the trajector was in contact with the landmark or not (as in the plane flew over the mountain vs. he climbed over the mountain). 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. This analysis raised profound questions about how image schemas could be grouped, transformed, and how sequences of image schemas could be chained together in language, mind and brain.