Deliberate Metaphors and Embodied Simulation

Recent studies of a behavioural kind (e.g., Glenberg and Kaschak 2002), neuroimaging kind (e.g., Kemmerer et al. 2008) and neurophysiological kind (e.g., Papeo et al. 2009) have shown that the sensorimotor system is involved in language understanding. Listening to the sentence “John grasps the glass” activates hand-related areas of the motor cortex even if we are not carrying out any hand-related action. This mechanism is known as Embodied simulation (Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011) and has been shown to be a widespread mechanism in the brain, also characterizing the control of emotion and perception. The recruitment of Embodied Simulation has even been observed during metaphor comprehension (e.g., Boulenger et al. 2012; Desai et al. 2011). This has led Gibbs (e.g., 2015a, 2015b) to conclude that when processing bodily metaphors people recruit bodily knowledge as a function of cross-domain mapping. Yet the role of Embodied Simulation in the construction of figurative meaning is still controversial, with reports of contrasting empirical findings (e.g., Lai and Curran 2013). We will review this literature in the light of a novel definition of Embodied Simulation (Cuccio 2015a, 2015b, 2018) and its role at various stages of language processing, in interaction with the distinction between deliberate and nondeliberate metaphors (Steen 2008, 2015, 2017). We claim that this approach can explain the apparent incongruity of findings showing that the mechanism of simulation that has not always been found activated during the processing of action related figurative language. We claim that only deliberate metaphor use recruits the full mechanism of Embodied Simulation and its potential for affecting the resulting mental representation of a metaphor in working memory (Cuccio 2018; Steen 2018).