Cognitive linguistics holds that meaning in language is the mapping between linguistic expressions and cognitive structures that arise from our direct sensory experience and interactions with the world. Taking as a starting point the notions of image schema (Lakoff & Johnson 1987) and force dynamics (Talmy 1988), in two experiments, we tested naive subjects’ intuitions about the image‐schematic basis of causal and concessive discourse markers. In the first experiment, conducted in English and Spanish, subjects were confronted with a series of animation that depicted forceful interactions between two entities and were asked to make a force‐choice response indicating the sentences that best described the animations that they had watched. English and Spanish participants showed a general preference for descriptions with causal connectives when one of the entities involved in the interaction was overcome by the other. On the contrary, sentences with concessive connectors were favored when the attempts of one of the entities to control the other were unsuccessful. Similar results were obtained in a second experiment where subjects’ judgments were explicitly guided by the sentence connectors given that the linguistic descriptions that accompanied the animations included a nonce verb in their coda such that literal references to the notion of force were avoided. Altogether, these results support the hypothesis that there is consistency across‐ subjects in the imagistic basis of causal and concessive connectives, which seem to recruit our experiential knowledge about forces as part of their meaning.

中文翻译：

---

英语和西班牙语中因果关系和让步的图像示意图基础

认知语言学认为，语言中的意义是语言表达与认知结构之间的映射，这些映射源于我们与世界的直接感官体验和互动。以图像图式 (Lakoff & Johnson 1987) 和力动力学 (Talmy 1988) 的概念为起点，在两个实验中，我们测试了天真的受试者对因果和让步话语标记的图像图式基础的直觉。在第一个实验中，用英语和西班牙语进行，受试者面对一系列描述两个实体之间有力互动的动画，并被要求做出力选择反应，指出最能描述他们看过的动画的句子。当参与交互的一个实体被另一个实体克服时，英语和西班牙语参与者表现出对带有因果连接词的描述的普遍偏好。相反，当一个实体控制另一个实体的尝试失败时，带有让步连接符的句子受到青睐。在第二个实验中获得了类似的结果，在该实验中，受试者的判断明确地由句子连接符引导，因为伴随动画的语言描述在其尾声中包含了一个 nonce 动词，从而避免了对力概念的字面引用。总而言之，这些结果支持了以下假设：在因果和让步连接词的意象基础中，跨主题具有一致性，