Image schemas revisited: The academic teaching context

The paper addresses issues from the area of the interface between theoretical linguistic courses and their possible practical implementation for university language didactics. Specifically, it illustrates didactically implementable procedure of introducing students into the embodiment premise, fundamental for Cognitive Linguists’ views on language, and follow-up analyses of language expressions, which show the extent to which configurations of image schemas organizing human cognitive functioning can be discovered in semantic structures of the expressions. Image schemas-based analyses allow one to uncover differences in usage of reflexive morphemes Polish się ‘self’ and English -self; assumed equivalents: English wash and Polish myć / umyć ‘wash’; and subtle differences in distribution of semantically related English lexemes see, look(at) and watch.