Breaking Down Finance: A Method for Concept Simplification by Identifying Movement Structures from the Image Schema PATH-following

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 cognitive 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 PATHfollowing 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