ABSTRACT
And I was proud to have him learn that I could f ly. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, 1943)
In this short passage extracted from the famous novel by Saint-Exupery, the narrator describes the first encounter of the little prince with a plane; how he taught him what this object was, what it was used for, to whom it belonged and of course what was its name. Following this, one could argue that every piece of information, from the visual properties of the object to more abstract information, such as its affiliation, are related to this particular experience of the first encounter with the plane. That meaning is anchored in one’s perceptual, affective and motor experience is one of the core statements of embodied semantics (Glenberg 1997; Barsalou 1999, 2008; Pulvermüller 1999, 2005; Gallese et al. 2004; Keysers and Perrett 2004; Pecher and Zwaan 2005; Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Fischer and Zwaan 2008; Meteyard et al. 2012; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011; Kiefer and Pulvermüller 2012).
