Embodiment of language: theories, controversies and perspectives

Systematising advances of modern cognitive science I put forward a hypothesis that language functioning (in a situation of communication, ontogenesis and phylogenesis) is made possible due to intersubjective perceiving-feeling-understanding cross- and multimodal bodily experience which is a product of interiorising primarily iconic and indexical communicative interactions about different objects of perception in diverse situational contexts. The object of analysis is the nature of interrelation between the form, meaning and referent of a linguistic structure and its objective is explanation of this interrelation by different approaches of cognitive linguistics. On the grounds of the analysis of image-schemas as prospective experiential basis of language embodiment, I conclude that image-schemas are an instrument of individual cognition since they are covertly enacted representations and cannot be intersubjectively shared. I suggest that image-schemas are formed on the basis of overtly enacted mimetic schemas, which insures interiorisation of intersubjectively accessible bodily experience and creates the junction-point between the imitative (iconic) and the representational (symbolic). I claim that language can only be understood in the context of communication where the verbal action is an integral part of the communicative action enacted by multimodal means of exteriorising inner semantic-pragmatic structures – auditory (speech, intonation) and visual (facial expressions, articulation gestures, hand gestures, bodily movements) that function as intersubjectively accessible iconic and indexical scaffolding of meaning-making.