Building on recent research, this paper argues that left-right bilaterality and symmetrical reversibility play only a limited role in the embodied grounding of chiasmus and its cognitive and cultural affordances. Expanding such accounts to feature the bodily semiotics of vertical and transverse modeling is necessary. To better demonstrate this point and elaborate on its implications, the paper presents two narrative case studies: Sylvia Plath’s short story ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ and Episode 1 of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, entitled ‘Sad Ass Songs’. Both narratives evoke explicitly embodied blends involving analogous upper-lower body part systems; both integrate these blends with chiastic dynamics that are explicit in the syntax and implicit in the discourse pragmatics of each text; and both texts use these chiastic macro-blends to frame transformations that function as each narrative’s interpretive locus. I explicate these sense-making strategies through a semiotic discourse analysis, applying insights from Peircean semiotics and cognitive linguistics to show how chiastic meaning can be grounded in the coalescence of oppositional but complementary layers of tonal iconicity (felt resemblances) referenced by diagrammatic types and tokens, all of which are implicit in, and intrinsic to, the lived experience of habitual upright posture.

The findings of cognitive linguistics demonstrate the thoroughly embodied grounding of linguistic constructions and linguistic meaning ranging from abstract thought to interactive communication. A historical survey and updated summary of work in this area illustrates the many layers of bodily meaning that we rely on when thinking and communicating as human beings. Key distinctions, definitions, and clarifications, plus an overview of key works on embodied cognition in cognitive linguistics provide necessary context for understanding specific aspects of linguistic embodiment, including schemas and iconicity, mapping and metaphor, categories and projections, embodied grammar and abstract thought, intersubjectivity, and textual meaning. Realigning philosophical presuppositions with the findings of cognitive linguistics has important consequences: Body and mind can be reunited in lived experience. Both imaginative thought and rational thought can be understood as reliant on the same movement and memory structures. Even the most habituated form‐content relationships in language can be understood as growing out of vital networks of real‐world experiential relations, from the personal to the interpersonal. And instead of being understood as the narrow purview of semantics and pragmatics, the study of meaning can be embraced as the purpose and function of linguistics. These consequences have potential for revolutionizing scientific inquiry and theory building across a wide array of disciplines.This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics Psychology > Language Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science

Chiasmus has long been discussed as a rhetorical figure for the symmetrical reversal of linguistic structures in oral and written texts. Recent treatments have begun to challenge this parochial status in ways that are reminiscent of the embodied metaphor revolution in cognitive semantics. This paper further develops the argument that chiastic schemas are a rich source of embodied cognition in need of broader recognition and deeper understanding. A cognitive poetic analysis of Dylan Thomas' iconic work “Vision and Prayer” facilitates this discussion. The dialectic weave of inverse structures and corporeal schemas that emerge from the poem illustrate the aesthetic ubiquity of cognitive chiasmus. Its lived, intertwining nature is proposed as an antidote to the “missing body” problem, as a more complex approach to cognitive symmetry and as a primary source of conceptual blending.

Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English ‘table leg,’ ‘mountain face’) have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity, and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated “algorithmically.” I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects “stripped of their bodily associations” (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the “algorithm” in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memories — an experiential ground that generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration.