The Object Image-schema and Other Dependent Schemas

Image-schemas (e.g. CONTAINER, PATH, FORCE) are pervasive skeletal patterns of a preconceptual nature which arise from everyday bodily and social experiences and which enable us to mentally structure perceptions and events (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987, 1989). Within Cognitive Linguistics, these recurrent non-propositional models are taken to unify the different sensory and motor experiences in which they manifest themselves in a direct way and, most significantly, they may be metaphorically projected from the realm of the physical to other more abstract domains. In this paper, we intend to provide a cognitively plausible account of the OBJECT image-schema, which has received rather contradictory treatments in the literature. The OBJECT schema is experientially grounded in our everyday interaction with our own bodies and with other discrete entities. In the light of existence-related language (more specifically, linguistic expressions concerning the creation and destruction of both physical and abstract entities), it is argued that the OBJECT image-schema may be characterized as a basic image-schema, i.e. one that functions as a guideline for the activation of additional models, including other dependent image-schematic patterns (LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTREPERIPHERY, etc.) which highlight various facets of the higher-level schema.