Image schemas provide preverbal conceptual structures and are suggested to be the conceptual building blocks from which cognitive phenomena such as language and reasoning are constructed. 'Motion along a path' is one of the first image schemas infants remember, making PATH-following one of the earliest cog-nitive building blocks. We are interested in the importance of this developmentally relevant image schema in abstract adult language. For this purpose, we propose a semi-automated method to extract image-schematic structures related to PATH-following from a multilingual financial terminology. Two major assumptions are that a linguistic mapping of image schemas facilitates the understanding of complex concepts and is persistent across languages. Our results show that complex textual representations can be made simpler to understand by extracting the underlying image schemas and that they are persistent across languages. Another result includes the identification of novel specifications of predefined image-schematic structures. Published on CEUR-WS. Copyright © 2016 for the individual papers by the papers' authors.

The project COINVENT acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET-Open Grant number: 611553. The IIIA part of this work has been funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 567652/ESSENCE: Evolution of Shared Semantics in Computational Environments.

Peer Reviewed