A Study on Cross Domain Projection of Sensory Vocabularies from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics —A Case Study on Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream
Cognitive linguistics claims that human cognition is empirical. It highlights
cognition as the important link between reality and language. Human beings use
languages to understand the world, which follows the procedure of “reality-interaction-
image schema-category-concept-language”. Vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch are the
basic human senses. The five senses are the immediate and direct contact of man with
the world to form images and concepts. They interplay and influence each other to
help humans to understand the world around them. This paper takes I Have a Dream
as an example to analyze the relationship between words and human cognition by way
of the five senses from empirical and interactive attributes of cognitive linguistics, so
as to provide inspiration for effective understanding of the metaphorical function of
language.