ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the relationship between language, culture and cognition, and with the balance between general human cognitive constraints and culture-specific cognitive patterns. He explains some of the pervasive everyday-language correlation between two metaphoric structures, a vertical hierarchic model of self and Society and a 'container' model of self and Society. The author examines a scene from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as a salient instance of the way these correlated metaphorical mappings work together to create coherence in a literary text. He argues that a whole range of domains share this correlation between UP and IN. The structure of the human body thus gives us significant reasons to correlate the upwards end of a vertical dimension with the inner part of a container structure, and the centre of a centre/periphery structure. Verticality, as well as centre-periphery and containment, is thus a central aspect of our understanding of the structure of self.
