Językowy obraz procesów poznawczych we frazeologii polskiej (analiza kognitywno-metaforyczna)
The Linguistic Image of Cognitive Processes in Polish Phraseology (a Cognitive-Metaphorical Perspective)

Summary/Abstract: The article reconstructs the linguistic image of cognitive processes in Polish based on a sample of fifty phraseological units. It adopts a cognitive-metaphorical perspective combined with a semantic-pragmatic analysis, allowing for the description of dominant conceptual schemas: THINKING IS EFFORT, THINKING IS A JOURNEY, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, UNDERSTANDING IS LIGHT, and THINKING IS WAR. The analysis reveals how phraseological units denote intellectual activities (reasoning, memory, decision-making, idea generation), attributing to them spatial, material, dynamic, and conflictual dimensions. Particular attention is given to somatic metaphors – especially metaphorical representations of the head – as central conceptual material for both knowledge storage and the expression of emotional tensions. The novelty of the study lies in the typology of conceptual metaphors related to cognitive processes in Polish and the reconstruction of their evaluative dimension. The results indicate strong evaluative patterns regarding cognitive processes: intellectual competence is linguistically endorsed, whereas cognitive chaos and forgetting are devalued. The article includes a typology of metaphors, an index of analyzed units, and a discussion of the pragmatic functions of the phraseological expressions. The study is qualitative in nature; the selection of units was based on their representativeness in phraseological dictionaries.

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