What is it about?
This article re-examines one of the central ideas of Cognitive Linguistics: that abstract thinking is grounded in recurring patterns of bodily experience. We argue that experiential correlations, such as the association between quantity and verticality or affection and warmth, do not by themselves explain metaphor. For a metaphor to become meaningful and cognitively productive, there must also be a more abstract form of similarity, which we call high-level resemblance. At the same time, we show that experiential correlations play a much broader role in metonymy than has generally been assumed. Through analyses of a wide range of linguistic examples, we demonstrate that causal and situational metonymies are deeply rooted in embodied experience and help explain phenomena ranging from everyday inference to grammatical constructions and complex figurative expressions. The paper proposes a refinement of the experientialist framework by restoring resemblance to a central role in metaphor theory while expanding the explanatory scope of experiential correlation in the study of metonymy
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Why is it important?
The paper addresses two long-standing theoretical issues in Cognitive Linguistics. First, it explains why some experiential correlations become productive metaphors while others do not. We argue that correlation must be accompanied by high-level resemblance, an abstract similarity in the way people experience and evaluate situations. Second, the paper broadens the understanding of metonymy by showing that it is not merely a mental shortcut or perspective-taking device but a fundamentally embodied phenomenon grounded in recurring causal and situational experiences. By bringing these two insights together, the article offers a more precise and comprehensive account of how metaphor and metonymy emerge from human experience. The proposal contributes to ongoing debates about embodiment, figurative thought, and the cognitive foundations of language, while also helping to explain why similar cognitive mechanisms recur across many areas of linguistic structure.
Perspectives
This article is particularly meaningful to me because it revisits questions that have occupied Cognitive Linguistics since its beginnings. Over the years, experiential correlation has become one of the most influential concepts in the field, yet I felt that some aspects of its explanatory potential had not been fully explored, while others had perhaps been taken for granted. Working on this paper gave me the opportunity to rethink the relationship between metaphor, metonymy, and embodiment from a broader theoretical perspective. I especially enjoyed developing an account that places metaphor and metonymy within a more unified framework and that connects abstract theoretical issues with the interpretation of everyday linguistic expressions. More generally, I hope the article encourages readers to reconsider familiar assumptions and stimulates further discussion about the cognitive foundations of figurative language.
Professor Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza
University of La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Refining the Experientialist Thesis: How Correlation Motivates Metonymy and High-Level Resemblance Enables Metaphor, Cognitive Semantics, August 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10103.
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